If this turns out to be the case it will be reflected in the age-adjusted hospitalization data. Taking
Quebec, for example, which publishes this data, a vaccinated individual still has 1/10th the likelihood of being hospitalized for COVID-19 as an unvaccinated individual (during the past month). If omicron takes over completely and becomes incidental to hospitalization instead of a contributing cause of it, the ratio should approach unity and overall hospitalizations (COVID or non-COVID) should drop to pre-COVID levels. But that is certainly not the case at the moment. In fact, Quebec is currently locking down again because hospitals are near or over capacity. The problem is that even if omicron is, say, 1/3 as likely to result in hospitalization as delta,
as one recent analysis suggests, the current daily case count (which may not even be the peak) in Quebec was
20 times as high as the delta peak. And that's an under count, since people are being told to stay home and not get tested because the testing infrastructure is completely overwhelmed. Simple arithmetic suggests that an omicron variant 1/3 as likely to lead to hospitalization as delta should lead to approximately 6.7 times as many hospitalizations, all else being equal, and assuming that today is actually the peak... which it almost certainly isn't, given the current slope of the chart.
