Anyway, 0.1% for Omicron getting close to "just a flu"
It depends on whether you're talking about CFR in the presence of vaccination (and prior immunity) or not. Our influenza CFRs are generally in the presence of partial vaccination. But for a very virulent disease, a small subset of unvaccinated individuals can really raise the CFR. So comparisons like this are very tricky.
I agree this is an interesting test case. And that it seems like the overall partially-but-not-completely vaccinated CFR could be approaching that level. I'm not sure how we compare that to influenza though.
The
IFR for influenza doesn't exceed 0.1% until about age 70-75. So depending on ascertainment (I don't know our ascertainment rate for either disease), the CFR for influenza probably doesn't reach 0.1% until perhaps age 60-65.
How does the CFR look for Omicron COVID for age 60-65? How would it look for an entirely vaccinated population? How would it look with a population vaccinated at the same rate as our typical influenza vaccination rate? How does that compare to influenza for that age group?
I don't know the answers to these questions, and so I don't know how the comparison works out. I do know that boosted vaccination dramatically reduces CFR, probably to very manageable levels.
In the end, this comparison is valid if the impact on society is similar. Right now that doesn't seem to be the case (and I don't think it's because of gov't interference - it's killing 2-3k people a day in this country), so I suspect straightforward comparisons like this are missing critical pieces of the puzzle, and we're not to influenza-level impacts yet.
I think you're still ignoring a few things - just how many more people Omicron is infecting compared to the flu - the rate of hospitalization, and the rate of long-COVID.
Yep. I do think that if everyone were vaccinated and boosted we could likely move on from COVID, but I'm not 100% sure on how that would work, and how the rates would work out. For sure the transmissibility is a huge difference between influenza and COVID. Vaccination and boosting and widespread multiple infections of the unvaccinated might bring that down to manageable levels, in addition to the increased protection. Would it be enough? I don't know.
It's possible the risk of COVID long term could even end up lower than influenza in a population with widespread immunity. I just don't know. Just like I don't know whether the disease will actually ever become endemic.
We also don't know for sure whether there is a clear strong & immutable link between the reduced Omicron virulence and its increased transmissibility. It's clear that hanging out in the throat is a better place for transmission, but what if a variant could gain additional advantage by spreading for longer, and somehow hanging out in the lungs later in an infection turned out to help in that endeavor? I sure hope it's a clear and robust and "inherent to nature" tradeoff, but my understanding is that we don't KNOW that it's a
fixed firm tradeoff - it just happens to be what Omicron ended up doing.