Agree, total deaths and lethality on an individual basis are very different. For simplicity, say "protected" means vaccinated or previously infected.

Say P(die, given unprotected and exposed) doesn't change with Omicron, and P(die, given protected and exposed) remains unchanged at zero. In that sense, there is no change in individual lethality.

The only change is that P(spread, given protected and exposed) increases with Omicron.

What do you get? Vastly faster spread and vastly more non-life threatening inflections.

Total deaths definitely go up simply because more non-protected are infected, but the ratio of deaths to infections goes down a lot.