This isn't unexpected though: Besides a much higher vaccination rate COVID-19 has been doing the rounds now for two years and at some point the people that were highly susceptible will have simply died off. The remainder of the population may deal with current strains better or worse depending on what differences those strains bring to the table, and not all of those differences may end up targeting the same populations.

The people who were killed last winter can’t be killed again. They were definitionally the most susceptible and we haven’t replaced that demographic. You can’t naively compare the two waves without a control since they effect very different populations. In other words, if you ran the same experiment backwards, you could plausible get the same results.

So far, it does look much better than last winter, but last year they had neither vaccines nor significant previous exposure.