This chart is from GrippeWeb, a project of the Robert Koch Institut to track rates of acute respiratory infections in Germany. They base their numbers on volunteer surveys, to provide data that are totally independent of the medical diagnostic apparatus. Right now, they estimate that 5.3 % of everyone in Germany has some kind of respiratory infection.
That sounds like a lot, but it’s in line with pre-pandemic infection rates. More than that, you can see here what a complete nothingburger the entire Omicron wave has been. Despite all the screeching headlines, Germans spent the latest SARS-2 wave on balance healthier than in the pre-pandemic era. If it weren’t for all the pointless quarantining, nobody would’ve noticed that anything was amiss.
Now consider a second piece of influenza surveillance data, the numbers reported by the German National Reference Centre:
Participating clinics take respiratory samples from sick patients, and these samples are then tested for influenza, RSV, rhinovirus, human metapneumovirus, parainfluenza, SARS-2 and the other human coronaviruses. For most of the weeks since January, Corona (orange) has been the single most common virus in the Reference Centre samples. Despite adding this totally new pathogen to our small repertoire of pervasive respiratory viruses, however, the overall rates of respiratory illness remained in line with that from prior years. We have an extra virus, but we don’t have more sick people1.
