Simply put, it’s not. Vaccines and paxlovid have contributed to reducing severity, but the virus itself is just as damaging as other variants.
“Omicron has comparable intrinsic severity to the ancestral Wuhan strain although the effective severity is substantially lower in Omicron cases due to vaccination.”
There is a good discussion of this on the Infectious Disease Puscast that is only about 3-4 minutes long. Skip to about 1:20 if you want to dive into the study directly.
