By mid‑December 2021 (when the episode aired), Omicron was just emerging in the U.S. Within weeks, it produced the largest U.S. COVID wave of the pandemic. CDC data show that by mid‑January 2022 Omicron accounted for about 99–100% of sequenced U.S. cases and was >96% of variants in every HHS region, with a seven‑day average of roughly 600–750k reported cases per day and well over 70 million cumulative U.S. cases by late January. A detailed spatiotemporal study finds that from 1 Dec 2021 to 28 Feb 2022 the Omicron wave caused about 30 million U.S. cases and 170,000 deaths, spreading rapidly across the entire country.

Crucially for the prediction, this explosive spread occurred despite ongoing public‑health restrictions in many "blue" jurisdictions. For example, California reinstated and then extended a statewide indoor mask mandate through at least mid‑February 2022 specifically because Omicron was driving a sharp surge; even with the mandate, the state’s seven‑day average case rate increased more than sixfold and hospitalizations doubled over two weeks. New York maintained mask and vaccine rules in schools and many venues into early 2022, yet New York City still saw daily case counts climb from about 14,000 on December 24, 2021 to roughly 40,000–45,000 per day around New Year’s, reflecting intense community spread under restrictions. Nationwide, the U.S. set records for both daily cases (around 1.25–1.5 million in mid‑January) and COVID hospitalizations during the Omicron wave.

Subsequent modeling work suggests that earlier or stronger measures could have reduced the number and peak of Omicron infections, but it still characterizes the winter 2021–22 U.S. Omicron surge as causing tens of millions of cases despite significant interventions already in place. In practical terms, Omicron did spread very widely across the United States and was not contained or “stopped” by public‑health restrictions. That outcome matches Sacks’s prediction that Omicron’s spread would be effectively impossible to stop and that it would propagate broadly regardless of interventions.