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An interesting take. You can see the huge gap between infection rates and deaths yourself by just googling "South Africa Coronavirus" and switching between the infection/death plots.

That being said, there is definitely a lag between infection/death (which I think media outlets are being cautious in making such a dramatic take yet, for instance see this CNBC article: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/09/south-africa-omicron-crisis-...), so we'll see if this holds up.

As sam-2727 says, this would be the dream scenario - the Unicorn that will lead us back to normal. My hope is that Covid would become cold/flu like and anything suggesting this is VERY good news. Particularly if it remains responsive to vaccines, letting them be a backup re: hospitalization.

Flu by itself is a big deal[1]. Most years, more people die from flu than from car accidents.

Another flu is not a dream scenario.

1. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html

Another flu that responds to vaccines sounds good, though.

What the tweet and graph misses is the fact that the NICD systems have a delay in reporting due to some recent IT changes for data security. https://twitter.com/nicd_sa/status/1469405508679483395

Nonono, then they would have called it omega ;)

Omicron – Is this the end of the pandemic?