COVID-19 doesn’t have to be medically severe to take a toll. Lekshmi Santhosh, a critical-care physician at UCSF, has seen Omicron exacerbate chronic health issues to the point where they turn fatal. “You could say they didn’t die of COVID,” she told me. “But if they didn’t have COVID, they wouldn’t have had this issue.” Iwasaki, of Yale, also worries about the storm of long-COVID cases, which can sprout out of infections that are initially almost symptom-free, that may soon be on the way. “Some of these people are bedridden, unable to return to work for months,” she told me. “There is nothing mild about it.”

In high-enough numbers, any Omicron infection can wreak havoc. Across the country, people are entering isolation in droves, closing schools and businesses, and hamstringing hospitals that can already ill-afford a staffing shortage. In many parts of the country, hospital capacities are already being reached and exceeded, making it difficult for people to seek care for any kind of illness. An overstretched system could also, ironically, mask the extent of Omicron’s tear: When hospitals are full, they cannot accept more patients, artificially deflating recorded rates of severe disease, even as total cases continue to rise. “Omicron may be more mild at the individual symptom level,” Duana Fullwiley, a medical anthropologist at Stanford who has studied how the term mild has affected people’s experience of sickle-cell anemia in Senegal, told me. “But we’re not talking about the severity of Omicron as it’s impacting the system.”