The good news about Omicron | No. 177 — January 2, 2022

Relative to cases, new daily hospitalizations and deaths are much lower than for prior variants. But can that continue?

Happy New Year to all, and may it welcome you with warm arms. After contracting covid-19 for Christmas, 2022 has already awarded me a full recovery. Many thanks to the readers who wished me well when I was out of commission.

The thing about finally getting covid-19 is that it brings a whole new meaning to “seeing yourself in the data” — one principle of data visualization we’re taught to keep in mind to maximize the value of data journalism. The following chart of daily new covid-19 cases in America, for example, now contains one tiny pixel for my own case. And that’s…. pretty cool, I guess? Especially since I’m healthy again. Others have not been so lucky as to be young, and with no comorbidities…

Speaking of data and Omicron, we see the story of the variant when we compare plots of new daily cases and deaths per 1m people. Though the number of new case has jumped over three-fold, from 364 to 1,268, in the last month, the number of new deaths has not increased accordingly. In fact, dea…