Omicron is outta here!

We finally turned back the covid curve — and returned to about the same levels of new cases as in late November.

Great progress — but largely the credit goes to the virus which essentially burnt itself out. As you’ll see from the numbers — it simply was too viral.

The US has officially recorded 78 million cases of COVID since inception — and almost 40% of those were covered in the last 3 months due to the OMICRON variant.

While we can be thankful that OMICRON is less fatal than preceeding variants — it has still resulted in over 160,000 deaths. I dread to think what would have happened had OMICRON been the first variant detected — and to hit an unvaccinated population.

Anyway it didn’t play out that way — so here are the current numbers.

Let us think about the area under the chart — with the high peak level of almost 2,500 cases per million per day. That represents over 30 million new covid cases here in the US and almost 160,000 deaths.

To put that in context, January was the highest ever month for cases in the US. The past 3 months of cases (Dec, Jan, Feb = 30 million) are more than the rest of 2021 (Jan — Nov = 28 million) combined.

Hardly any state in the US is showing significant new case levels!

The fatality curve is still slow in coming down — but we can expect much progress on that in the coming months. Here’s the heatmap of fatalities in the US today: