Ben Shapiro falsely claims “people weren't dying of Omicron in vast numbers”

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Citation From the April 19, 2022, edition of The Daily Wire's The Ben Shapiro Show

BEN SHAPIRO (HOST): They're so out of touch with the American people. And it's on every, single issue. COVID just happens to be the most obvious issue. Like, if you look at the polls right now -- if you asked a year ago, what is Americans' top issue? It's COVID. If you look right now, Americans care less about COVID than they do about, pretty much anything else except for string theory. Like, they don't care about this at all.

And the reason they don't care about it is because they're back to work. They're back to school. No one they know is dying of Omicron because people weren't dying of Omicron in mass numbers.

By late January, 2022, the Omicron variant accounted for 99.5 percent of all new COVID-19 infections in the United States. During that time, the seven-day average for new COVID-19 deaths reached 2,267. From January 30 through February 5, more than 18,400 Americans died from COVID.

As visualized by The New York Times, the Omicron peak, on the far right, was one of the highest peaks of the entire pandemic in the United States in terms of deaths per day.

COVID-19 deaths via NYT tracker, from 4/19/22
COVID-19 deaths per day, as visualized by The New York Times. Screenshot from 4/19/22.