I think it's really important to stress that while it is obviously great to see fewer people in hospital, that alone doesn't tell us very much about the severit

I think it's really important to stress that while it is obviously great to see fewer people in hospital, that alone doesn't tell us very much about the severity of the variant, or the expected outcome in other countries. We would already expect the number of hospitalisations second wave to be way lower, because of the effect of higher levels of immunity through vaccines and previous infection versus the first wave. The Discovery Health research from South Africa [1] suggests that Omicron might result in about 30% fewer hospitalisations versus an equivalent Delta infection, but it's still early days and it's hard to get clear data given the number of confounding factors. The early research from Imperial in the UK [2] says: "The study finds no evidence of Omicron having lower severity than Delta, judged by either the proportion of people testing positive who report symptoms, or by the proportion of cases seeking hospital care after infection." with the notable qualification that "hospitalisation data remains very limited at this time." Even if it's substantially less severe, it does seem certain from the way it's ripping through the UK at the moment that it spreads extremely quickly – and even with a lower chance of hospitalisation, we could quickly see a very large spike in the number of people requiring care, with the corresponding stress on already overstretched healthcare. I'm definitely a bit concerned about the amount of "it's basically just a cold now!" chat we've been seeing – something we'd all like to be the case because pandemics are shite. But anecdotally I have witnessed first-hand quite a few people I know here in the UK being pretty blasé in the run up to Christmas and getting quite sick as a result. [1] https://www.discovery.co.za/corporate/news-room#/pressreleases/discovery-health-south-africas-largest-private-health-insurance-administrator-releases-at-scale-real-world-analysis-of-omicron-outbreak-based-dot-dot-dot-3150697 https://www.discovery.co.za/corporate/news-room#/pressreleas... [2] https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/232698/modelling-suggests-rapid-spread-omicron-england/ https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/232698/modelling-suggests-ra...