IHME Predictions

The WHO is actually just citing IHME, the University of Washington researchers who have been putting out estimates since the early days of the pandemic.  They suggest Europe will hit 50% in 6 to 8 weeks.   Perhaps the bigger headline should be 'IHME estimates the 50% of Americans will have had Omicron in 6 weeks".
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The other things IHME is predicting about the US. I've bolded the stuff that surprises me.

1. The "detection rate" has probably already peaked, we should see known cases drop even as actual cases continue.
2. Hospitalizations which recently hit last December's levels will likely double yet again, but it will be deceptive because as many as half of these COVID counts will be people already in the hospital (still super dangerous and deadly, but distortive of the data on outcomes for an Omicron infection on your typical everyday American with multiple comorbidities and unhospitalized pre-COVID)
3. Daily deaths will peak below 2,000 per day, and the peak will come before the end of January.  This is below daily peaks of last summer and last winter.
4. Ramping up mask use and vaccinating the partially hesitant (85% of people say they would get vaccinated in the US and the partially hesitant is the subset who havent ) will not signficiantly impact the trajectory in the next few months. 
5. They also say testing and quarantining might not be helpful at these levels and maybe not worth the disruption of school/work.  They say they think 85% of Omicron is asymptomatic.

I think they are low on peak daily deaths in the US, which I had at 3,300 before reading this.   I think they are assuming no deaths from the people who werent admitted with COVID but caught it in the hospital.   If we assume that 50% of our nation's 700K baseline hospitalized population, serious cases of people who have cancer, immune disorders, organ failures, diabetes, all of the above catch COVID, a bunch of them are going to die.  Hard to count these deaths, in some places they may over-count them, in Florida they will undercount them.  Even harder to predict how they count these deaths in various states but I think IHME is zero-counting them, so I'll stick with the over on 2,000 for now, but probably drop from 3,300 to 2,800.Regarding policy stuff.  My kids' schools started a general testing policy of everyone who doesnt opt out.   The school policy is that if there is a kid with a positive test in the class and the lab calls them during the day parents are notified to pick the kids up, as if the school were on fire.  Which seems a bad strategy in an urban school where half the kids are going to have gotten it.