Epidemiologist David Dowdy of Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health said that, despite the case increases, hospitalization and death rates overall remain relatively low compared with earlier periods in the pandemic — a reflection of how much immunity there is in the population.

“In some ways, this is encouraging, in that we’re starting to see a divergence between the number of cases and the number of hospitalizations and deaths,” Dowdy said. “But it’s also a little bit discouraging that we’ve been through all this and we’re still seeing a flat line and an uptick in the number of people getting admitted to the hospital and in people dying.”…

The current infection spikes are different in other ways from previous waves. While those were driven by entirely new variants that emerged from distant points on SARS-2’s family tree, now different Omicron branches are igniting new outbreaks. This “genetic drift” is closer to how flu strains evolve.

“Perhaps what we might see will be these waves of subvariants,” said Jonathan Abraham, an assistant professor of microbiology at Harvard Medical School.