A graphic by epidemiologist Michael Oleson shows a startling gap between red and blue counties in COVID-19 death rates since the Coronavirus vaccines became widely available last spring:
…a situation that is bound to get much, much worse once the full brunt of the Omicron variant hits the United States, per the New York Times’s David Leonhardt, who writes “One telling detail is that Covid deaths in both swing counties and heavily Biden counties have not risen over the past two months, even as nationwide case numbers have surged. In heavily vaccinated communities, rising caseloads don’t automatically lead to rising death tolls… Omicron appears to be so contagious that even a modest decline in severity – such as the decline estimated in an early analysis from South Africa – could still lead to a large spike in deaths, as Dr. Robert Wachter of UC San Francisco, explained to me. Some basic arithmetic makes the point: Imagine that the risk of death is 30 percent lower from an Omicron case than a Delta case – but that Omicron leads to a tenfold increase in cases. This combination would lead to a substantial increase in deaths. ‘It’s bad number times a decent number, and you end up with a bad number,’ Wachter said.”