Ever since 19 Dec 2021, the dominant variant of COVID has been Omicron. Depending on the quality of administered medical care, it takes anywhere from 1500 to 3000 Omicron infections to produce one single COVID death.
In a large study in Ontario, Canada, it took 3108 COVID infections with Omicron, just to produce one single death.
When applied to excess deaths in the US, you can back-calculate how many Omicron infections it would take if COVID was 100% of the cause of the excess deaths.
If the quality of medical care in the US was considered poor, you could see 1 death in every 1500 infections. Conversely, if the quality of medical care in the US was high, you could see 1 death in every 3000 infections.
For the two months from 19 Dec 2021 to 20 Feb 2022, there were 139,474 excess deaths in the US.
Here are the implied total COVID infections for those two months:
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Low-quality medical care
Implied Omicron infections to produce 139,474 deaths = 209 million infections
High-quality medical care
Implied Omicron infections to produce 139,474 deaths = 418 million infections
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Under the assumption that administered medical care in the US is of high-quality, the implied total number of Omicron infections is greater than the total US population. Even under the assumption that administered medical care in the US is of low-quality, it is difficult to explain the recent excess deaths as being related to COVID.
Reference
[Omicron dominant since 19 Dec 2021] Shi DS, Whitaker M, Marks KJ, et al. Hospitalizations of Children Aged 5–11 Years with Laboratory-Confirmed COVID-19 — COVID-NET, 14 States, March 2020–February 2022. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep 2022;71:574-581. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm7116e1
[12 total deaths from 37,296 Omicron infections; i.e., 3108 COVID infections required to produce one COVID death] — Ulloa AC, Buchan SA, Daneman N, Brown KA. Estimates of SARS-CoV-2 Omicron Variant Severity in Ontario, Canada. JAMA. Published online February 17, 2022. doi:10.1001/jama.2022.2274. Available: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2789408
Note: CDC estimates 30 million symptomatic flu infections in 2014/15, which gives an estimated total of flu infections of 35.7 million (at 16% asymptomatics). This was in a season when 51,000 flu deaths were recorded (1 death per 700 infections). Applied to the Ontario sample of n=37,296, the flu from the 2014/15 season would have caused 53 deaths — more than 4 times as many deaths as Omicron variant infections caused.—https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html