With that said, I do agree with the proposal that if a kid has already had covid then why vaccinate them if the general consensus is that the vaccines only provide limited protection for a few months. All for vaccinating high risk people and I am vaccinated against covid with a booster from when they first came out but will not get another booster now that I have already had Covid. Omicron in general for most people is no worse than the flu, unpleasant but bearable. I fully understand the rush to vaccinate adults in the beginning when Delta was raging and we had limited understanding of the virus. Luckily Omicron is dominant now it seems to be much less damaging. This is not to downplay the very real consequences and deaths that do occur still from Covid. At this point in time my whole family has had it and I have accepted it as endemic and moved on.
Flu in the US kills around 12k to 50k per year, with a particularly bad year every few decades getting up to maybe 80k. Omicron killed somewhere between 150k and 250k in the US in less than a year, and that was with free vaccines that were highly effective against death easily available to pretty much everyone who was not a young child.
That doesn't sound like no worse than the flu to me.
Flu numbers typically are a small sample size and extrapolated based on respiratory-like illness admissions in hospitals nationwide.
You know you have to substantiate such a wild claim, right? Nobody is counting patients with broken arms that happen to have Covid as Covid patients.
https://www.businessinsider.com/covid-patients-nyc-hospitals...
Further googling reveals this similar headline: "Over 40% of NYC’s COVID-infected hospital patients admitted for other reasons"
This then begs the question, if in fact 60% of people are going to hospital because of COVID that indicates a very big problem.
Hospitals by their design are always meant to be full and their size will be determined based on an expected amount of demand.
If the hospital contains these unexpected COVID cases that then means many people who need to go to hospital will not be going to hospital only because the beds are taken up by these COVID patients.
If you have 10% of the hospital population in hospital with COVID (and just for COVID) you will have degraded the performance of the hospital by 10%.
This is because hospitals are designed to operate at maximum capacity (i.e all the beds are in use and there is a waiting list to get a bed). Every bed in use by a COVID patient will just add someone to the waiting list.
So my question would be what percentage of patients are in hospital because of COVID and only because of COVID?
That number is a very good measure of the pressure that hospital system will be under and my guess is it will be much greater than 10%.