Even when true, deadliness is just one part of the problem. The second part is transmissibility. Flu is not highly transmissible, it has R0 = 1.3 only. This me

Even when true, deadliness is just one part of the problem. The second part is transmissibility. Flu is not highly transmissible, it has R0 = 1.3 only. This means that 75% of the population will be not affected by. It can only kill 0.025% of the population. If Omicron has R0 = 9 as has been claimed, it will infect 90% of the population. When it had same mortality as flu, it could kill 0.09% of the population - that is 4x difference. In US it would be roughly 750000 deaths because of flu and 300000 because of Omicron. Now this probably will work in setting where the speed of the transmission is slow enough that hospitals can manage the requirements put on them. If they could not because of too many concurrent cases, number of deaths can be higher.