Uncanny Omicron Death in the Young in 2022
Omicron variant not lethal enough to cause the COVID deaths recorded
For the first 9 months of 2022, Omicron variant COVID predominated. To get an evidence-based estimate on the infection fatality rate (IFR) for Omicron, you can “step-down” twice from the original IFR:
once down to Delta variant (only 42% as lethal as prior strains)
and again down to Omicron (only 31% as lethal as Delta)
But once you do that, you find that something disturbing happens in 2022 …
Reported Omicron deaths among the young become uncanny:
[click image to enlarge]
The elderly IFR for “pre-vaccine” COVID was taken from the 7 elderly deaths which occurred on the Diamond Princess, when 457 elderly passengers had become infected.
To explain the recorded 2,000 Omicron deaths in those below age 35 (in the first 9 months of 2022), requires approximately 339 million Omicron infections.
But there are less than 50 million Americans in that age band. Because the disease itself isn’t lethal enough to kill 2,000 in that age band, something else must have caused most of those 2,000 deaths.
To explain the COVID death in 2022 among those below age 25 requires assuming an average of 18 infections per person over the course of 9 months (two Omicron infections per person per month).
Reference
[leading causes of death by age] — Peterson-KFF Health Tracker. https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/brief/covid-19-leading-cause-of-death-ranking/
[true IFR by age of “pre-vaccine” COVID] — Age-stratified infection fatality rate of COVID-19 in the non-elderly informed from pre-vaccination national seroprevalence studies. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.11.22280963v1
[From ~700,000 cases confirmed by sequencing, Delta was 42% as fatal as Alpha] — Table 3. Number of confirmed and probable cases by variant as of 11 October 2021. UK Technical Briefing #25. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/investigation-of-sars-cov-2-variants-technical-briefings
[From 1.5 million confirmed cases, Omicron is 31% as lethal as Delta, making Omicron much safer than the seasonal flu] — Nyberg T, Ferguson NM, Nash SG, Webster HH, Flaxman S, Andrews N, Hinsley W, Bernal JL, Kall M, Bhatt S, Blomquist P, Zaidi A, Volz E, Aziz NA, Harman K, Funk S, Abbott S; COVID-19 Genomics UK (COG-UK) consortium, Hope R, Charlett A, Chand M, Ghani AC, Seaman SR, Dabrera G, De Angelis D, Presanis AM, Thelwall S. Comparative analysis of the risks of hospitalisation and death associated with SARS-CoV-2 omicron (B.1.1.529) and delta (B.1.617.2) variants in England: a cohort study. Lancet. 2022 Mar 16:S0140-6736(22)00462-7. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(22)00462-7. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 35305296; PMCID: PMC8926413. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8926413/