Thanks to the hard work of tens of thousands of scientists, researchers, and health care workers, COVID is finally "just the flu", though it is still a very infectious flu that got a large fraction of the country sick in a very short time. Note that this graph is log scale, so the infection fatality rate for COVID used to be 20+ times higher than the flu and came down very dramatically.
Caseload in the Bay Area has been minimal for the past couple of weeks, and I've really been enjoying all the indoor events! It's been wonderful to see you all!
We will probably get another bump from BA2, but recent studies show it's no more deadly than Omicron, just more infectious. Given how many people have caught Omicron already, I'd guess that the BA.2 wave if we have one in the US will be nowhere near as big as the Omicron wave.
Here is a nice breakdown by age:
