The fast-moving coronavirus began the summer in the US with many infections but relatively few deaths compared to its previous incarnations.
The fast-moving coronavirus began the summer in the US with many infections but relatively few deaths compared to its previous incarnations.
COVID-19 is still killing hundreds of Americans every day, but it’s not as dangerous as it was last fall and winter.
“It’s going to be a nice summer and we deserve this break,” said Ali Mokdad, a professor of health indicators at the University of Washington in Seattle.
With more Americans protected from serious illness through vaccination and infection, COVID-19 has become—at least for now—an unpleasant, inconvenient inconvenience for many.
“I feel pretty good right now,” said Dr. Dan Kaul, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Michigan Medical Center in Ann Arbor. “For the first time in as long as I can remember, almost since it started, we have no (COVID-19) patients in the ICU.”
As the nation marks July 4, the average daily number of deaths from COVID-19 in the United States hovers around 360. Last year, during a similar summer lull, it was about 228 in early July. This remains the lowest daily death toll in the US since March 2020, when the virus first began spreading in the US.
But there were far fewer reported cases at this time last year – fewer than 20,000 a day. Now there are about 109,000 — and likely undercounts because home tests aren’t routinely counted.
Today, in the third year of the pandemic, it’s easy to feel confused by the mixed picture: Re-infections are increasingly likely, and a significant proportion of those infected will face lingering symptoms of long-term COVID-19.
However, the great danger of death has decreased for many people.
“And that’s because we’re now at a point where everyone’s immune system has seen either the virus or the vaccine two or three times by now,” said Dr. David Dowdy, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “Over time, the body learns not to overreact when it sees this virus.”
“What we’re seeing is that people, on average, are getting sick less often,” Dowdy said.
As many as 8 out of 10 people in the US have been infected at least once, according to one influential model.
Deaths from COVID-19 are a moving target, but have recently fallen to average flu season levels, according to data analyzed by Arizona State University health industry researcher Mara Aspinall.
At first, some people said the coronavirus was no more deadly than the flu, “and for a long period of time that wasn’t true,” Aspinall said. Back then, people had no immunity. The treatments were experimental. Vaccines do not exist.
Now, Aspinall said, built-up immunity has reduced the death rate to a steady level in a typical flu season. Over the past decade, the death rate from influenza has been about 5% to 13% of hospitalizations.
Big differences separate flu from COVID-19: The behavior of the coronavirus continues to surprise health experts, and it’s not yet clear whether it will settle into a flu-like seasonal pattern.
Last summer — when vaccinations first became widely available in the U.S. — was followed by the delta wave and then the arrival of omicron, which killed 2,600 Americans a day at its peak last February.
Experts agree that a new variant may emerge capable of escaping the built-up immunity of the population. And the rapidly spreading omicron subtypes BA.4 and BA.5 may also contribute to a change in the number of deaths.
“We thought we had it figured out until these new subvariants came along,” said Dr. Peter Hotez, an infectious disease specialist at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas.
It would be reasonable, he said, to assume that a new variant will emerge and hit the nation later this summer.
“And then another late fall/winter wave,” Hotez said.
In the coming weeks, deaths may increase in many states, but in the U.S. overall, deaths are likely to decline slightly, said Nicholas Reich, who summarizes the coronavirus forecast for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. diseases and Prevention.
“We have seen hospitalizations with COVID rise to about 5,000 new admissions each day from just over 1,000 in early April. But deaths due to COVID have increased slightly over the same time period,” said Reich, a professor of biostatistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Unvaccinated people have six times the risk of dying from COVID-19 compared to people with at least one primary series of vaccines, the CDC estimated based on data available as of April.
This summer, think about your own vulnerability and that of those around you, especially at large gatherings because the virus spreads so quickly, Dowdy said.
“There are still people who are very much at risk,” he said.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Division is supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Science Education Division. AP is solely responsible for all content.
Carla K. Johnson, Associated Press
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