In the U.S., it has become a comforting Omicron pastime for the vaccinated to pass around charts showing just how worse the disease continues to be for the unvaccinated and how unthreatening it is for the vast majority of those with two or three shots already. The charts are indeed reassuring: Data by the CDC does suggest an almost inconceivably large gap between the pandemic faced by those who have had their shots and those who have not, like an 16-fold divergence for all vaccinated adults and a 52-fold divergence for boosted seniors.

There is, though, more to a pandemic than the matter of individual risk faced by those behaving most responsibly. And at the social level vaccination rates don’t seem to tell the whole story, even in places where the numbers are, all things considered, quite good. New York state, for instance, boasts a comparable population-wide vaccination rate to the United Kingdom as a whole, and is just a few ticks below their coverage of seniors; but our death rate, during Omicron, has been almost three times as high. If you are so inclined, you can look at the same batch of recent data that suggests, to some, the retreat of Omicron and tell a contrary, disheartening story: More Americans have already died from COVID this month than died in battle in the Vietnam War. At no point over the past two years has the seven-day average of deaths fallen below 200, which means that on the absolute very best day of the pandemic, based on this metric — July 12, 2021 — the country was still on an annualized pace of 73,000 deaths from COVID. Right now, the annualized pace is more than 900,000. That number will surely fall in the near future, but between now and then, the country seems likely to be suspended in a weirder, uncertain-vibes phase with different metrics pointing in different directions and giving a pick-and-choose quality to COVID data, just contradictory enough to furnish plausible justifications for a whole range of perspectives about the shape of what’s to come.