@zen1
Yes, I noticed on the news Boris was careful to say with Omicron not of Omicron. It is entirely possible they died of something else but happened to have a test that showed they also had Omicron. We don’t know the extent to whether they were actually sick with Omicron when they passed away.
How high do you think rates are? There's now plenty of evidence from previous waves that there were a huge increase in deaths, but not a huge increase in deaths from other conditions, so it wasn't about people dying from strokes due to lack of ambulances - it was about the illness itself. There are also lots of deaths due to covid that would NOT count because it was more than 28 days from the positive test - many middle aged or younger people had a week before getting really sick and many more weeks in hospital before ultimately dying. Other people might have had covid that massively exacerbated an underlying condition so that 6 weeks after testing positive they died of a heart attack for example - but without being weakened by covid they could have had another decade.
It's a comforting untruth to believe these are all with not of.