For most of the COVID-19 pandemic, the daily focus has been on the number of cases, and secondarily, deaths. The most recent wave is caused by the omicron variant, first identified at the end of 2021 and the dominant variant through the first part of 2022. South Africa, one of the first countries to experience and report data regarding omicron, reported far fewer deaths, even as the number of reported cases rapidly eclipsed previous peaks. However, as more countries report on omicron, there remains uncertainty as to how it compares to prior waves. To more readily visualize the dynamics of cases and deaths, it is natural to plot deaths per million against cases per million. Unlike the time-series plots of cases or deaths that have become daily features of news outlets during the pandemic, which have time as the x-axis, in a plot of deaths vs. cases, time is implicit, and is indicated in relation to the starting point. Here we present and briefly examine such plots from a number of countries and from the world as a whole, illustrating how they summarize features of the pandemic in ways that are harder to extract from time series. These plots suggest that in most places, the omicron wave is very different from those that came before. Code for generating these plots for any country is provided on GitHub (https://github.com/rarnaout/Covidcycles).