Some mostly good COVID news -- Omicron has peaked in NYC and has been rapidly declining for about a week. It's likely that it infected so many people so quickly that it rapidly started approaching herd immunity and burning itself out. The death rate in NYC has also likely peaked, though it will probably stay at that peak for a couple of weeks. Furthermore, the vast majority of the hospitalized are unvaccinated even though most New Yorkers are vaccinated. New York health officials believe vaccination reduces your chance of hospitalization from Omicron by over 90%. This means the vast majority of the deaths we're seeing are people who are unvaccinated.
New York was the first major area of the US to see Omicron cases, so it gives those of us in the rest of the country a sense of what the near future will look like.
Vaccinated people are generally getting mild cases, and this wave will be over very soon. This hopefully means a return to the low caseloads and minimal restrictions we saw May-July 2021, barring some future variant that's sufficiently different to overcome the existing herd immunity. The rest of the US is a few weeks behind New York, and the Omicron wave will probably be a shitshow in less vaccinated parts of the country, but for well vaccinated areas, this will just be a month of somewhat stressed hospitals and lots of people getting moderately sick, followed by a return to low caseloads. I'm optimistic for the first time in a while. I'm glad we have the vaccines, tests, and knowledge to make what otherwise would have been a truly nasty virus into one that's tractable and hopefully over soon.