# Do CDC's "COVID Community Levels" account for home testing? **URL:** \ **Category:** The Quarantine Zone\ **Tags:** covid-quarantine\ **Created:** [June 14, 2022, 10:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-cdcs-covid-community-levels-account-for-home-testing/966157 "2022-06-14T10:20:34Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![puzzlegal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puzzlegal/32/3827_2.png) [@puzzlegal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puzzlegal)\ **Post date:** [June 16, 2022, 7:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-cdcs-covid-community-levels-account-for-home-testing/966157/21 "2022-06-16T19:32:27Z")
> [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](#): > > I’d be really careful about accepting those assertions without some strong caveats. Part of the reason that the ‘Omicron’ variant is producing less mortality in populations previously exposed to previous variants is because the original ‘wild-type’, ‘Alpha’, and ‘Delta’ variants have already clearcut through the most vulnerable populations, and many people have at least some degree of immunogenicity through prior exposure and/or vaccination, so even though ‘Omicron’ is more transmissible and is infecting vaccinated people, the severe morbidity and mortality is less. In naive populations such as mainland China and Taiwan where they effectively suppressed earlier variants the observed virulence of ‘Omicron’ is not nearly as benign. Ditto. We already lost a lot of our most vulnerable population to prior variants, and a large fraction of of who caught omicron in most of the world had prior exposure, via immunization, prior infection, or a combination of the two. As best as i can tell, [this study](https://www.news-medical.net/news/20220504/Study-suggests-SARS-CoV-2-Omicron-is-as-deadly-as-past-variants.aspx#:~:text=by%202%20people-,Study%20suggests%20SARS%2DCoV%2D2%20Omicron%20is,as%20deadly%20as%20past%20variants&text=A%20recent%20article%20under%20review,Omicron%20variant%20with%20prior%20mutants.) has not yet been peer reviewed, but it found that after adjusting for vaccination and assorted risk factors, Omicron was just about as likely to land someone in a hospital or kill them as earlier waves. The major difference in mortality is that people who had Omicron were a lot younger, a lot healthier, and a lot more likely to be vaccinated than people who caught prior variants. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-cdcs-covid-community-levels-account-for-home-testing/966157.md?page=1)