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While I agree that Omicron as an event, i.e. the infection wave around January 2022, was the end of any real mainstream concern about COVID, there's pretty good reason to believe the apparent increased transmissibility of Omicron was an illusion: there's no significant differences in transmissibility between COVID variants (the technical term in that paper is "SAR" for "Secondary Attack Rate").
In other words, we would have seen a much smaller wave in the winter of 2021-2022 if everyone acted like they did in the winter of 2020-2021 (when vaccines were new enough that only the highest priority/luckiest had gotten them), but they didn't. Probably due to people worrying less about being careful due to vaccines, although probably also a good amount of people feeling like they had had enough of isolating after several months.
Interesting and probably true. If we just "let it rip" it's likely we would have ended with fewer overall deaths as the disease would have quickly exhausted itself. The Omicron event would have happened in March 2020 instead of January 2022.
Obviously, in this counterfactual, the acute phase would have been awful. Hospitals would have been overrun, but it's unclear how much lifesaving care was happening anyway. Irresponsible use of ventilators definitely killed lots of people who would have survived otherwise.
In nearly every country, the damage caused by the Covid response was worse than the disease itself. China gets an F. Australia gets a D-. Sweden did it best, but I think that's only because there wasn't a "Super Sweden" that simply ignored the disease completely. (Maybe some African countries fit that bill due to lack of state capacity).
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