Researchers in Ontario followed 37,296 infections with Omicron variant and found a grand total of 12 deaths, giving 1 death for every 3108 Omicron infections.
To put the lethality of Omicron in perspective, 7 recent flu years were grabbed from the CDC summary page — even though CDC recently edited the page to dampen the lethality of the 2017/18 flu season.
An adjustment was made to the symptomatic case numbers — they were divided by 0.84 — in order to estimate the total number of flu infections, both symptomatic and asymptomatic.
On a spectrum of expected deaths per 4000 infections, either with flu or with Omicron, you can see that Omicron isn’t even one-third as fatal as the average flu.
This calls into question why COVID deaths were high in some places in January and February of 2022 — when Omicron variant had displaced all prior variants of COVID.
If COVID was not even a third as deadly as flu for those months, then how come it is that lots died in places like Arizona?
It does not appear that COVID killed them — as the dominant variant was not deadly enough to kill that many people — so we have to look elsewhere for the cause.
Reference
[past flu seasons] — CDC. Burden of Flu. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html
[Just 12 deaths from 37, 296 Omicron infections (1 death per 3108 infections)] — Ulloa AC, Buchan SA, Daneman N, Brown KA. Estimates of SARS-CoV-2 Omicron Variant Severity in Ontario, Canada. JAMA. 2022 Apr 5;327(13):1286-1288. doi: 10.1001/jama.2022.2274. PMID: 35175280; PMCID: PMC8855311. [full-text] JAMA. Published online February 17, 2022. doi:10.1001/jama.2022.2274 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2789408
[84% fraction of flu infections have symptoms] — Leung NH, Xu C, Ip DK, Cowling BJ. Review Article: The Fraction of Influenza Virus Infections That Are Asymptomatic: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. Epidemiology. 2015 Nov;26(6):862-72. doi: 10.1097/EDE.0000000000000340. PMID: 26133025; PMCID: PMC4586318. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4586318/