Do CDC's "COVID Community Levels" account for home testing?

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As best as i can tell, this study has not yet been peer reviewed, but it found that after adjusting for vaccination and assorted risk factors, Omicron was just about as likely to land someone in a hospital or kill them as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.