// According to something I read yesterday the WHO said that in the 38 countries that have reported the presence of the new variant no one has died directly as a result of it.//
I've also heard this, or something like it -- today's announcement is the first worldwide death associated with Omicron, I think. But it seems to me to be misleading, for two reasons:
1. It's much harder to test for Omicron specifically than for Covid in general. The UK has recorded I think a shade over 3000 official Omicron cases, which represents almost certainly a fraction of the true total. Likewise around the world, meaning that the lack of official deaths is not necessarily reflective of its true severity.
2. The variant has anyway been around officially for around a month. Most people who die do so around two or three weeks after infection, so, again, this would tend towards any official deaths taking a while to occur. It's sadly likely that the number of Omicron deaths will start to tick up over the next few weeks, and the "zero death rate" so far will, again, not last very long.
Still, there are I believe reasons to suggest that Omicron is at least no less deadly, on average, than Delta or any other Covid variant. It's more concerning that it seems very important to get boosters to protect against Omicron, so that the variant can potentially spread very far before protection starts to kick in.