Even as new omicron strains take over, Covid is no longer driving a majority of patients into the hospital. Still, doctors worry the virus could re-emerge as immunity wanes.
As the flu and RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) have spread rapidly this fall — inundating and overwhelming hospitals and their staff across the country — Covid has not.
In fact, Covid-related deaths and hospitalizations have fallen in recent months,despite the emergence of new omicron subvariants that evade immunity from previous infections and vaccination.
According to NBC News data, Covid deaths have fallen consistently since Aug. 31, when the seven-day average of daily Covid deaths was at 571. A month later, on Sept. 30, the number fell to 475. By Halloween, 365 were dying per day, on average, from Covid.
As of Nov. 14, the number had fallen to 316.
This week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is expected to release new data on Covid-related mortality, finding that death rates began to decline in March 2022.
The overall hopeful sign of declining deaths could indicate yet another new Covid phase, doctors suggest. Fewer people sick enough to be hospitalized with Covid means that fewer people are dying of the illness.
The average number of Covid hospitalizations per day has decreased by 27.9% since Aug. 28, according to NBC News data.
Even better, Covid, it seems, is no longer sending a majority of patients into intensive care units.
“There has not been an increase in patients admitted to the hospital specific for Covid-related disease,” said Dr. Hugh Cassiere, director of critical care services at Sandra Atlas Bass Heart Hospital at North Shore University Hospital, part of Northwell Health in New York City.
Patients in his ICU with Covid were admitted with unrelated medical issues, and were subsequently found to be Covid-positive, Cassiere said.
“Not to say that it’s gone, but Covid has become a coincidental disease,” he said.
Dr. Vin Gupta, a pulmonologist and an affiliate faculty member at the University of Washington in Seattle, attributes the decline in deaths and severe Covid cases to a level of “baked-in immunity,” including vaccination, prior infection or a combination of the two.
While Covid-related hospitalizations are not currently increasing, Gupta warns that they could during the winter as immunity, especially from previous infection, diminishes.
“If you had Covid, say six to four months ago, you’re going to have less protection against hospitalization than if you were vaccinated,” Gupta said. “The duration and the robustness of protection wanes a lot more quickly if all you rely on is natural immunity.”
With that in mind, data from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, a research center within the University of Washington, suggest that Covid hospitalizations and deaths could tick up again in “mid-January at the earliest,” said Gupta, a medical analyst for NBC News and MSNBC.
Despite the encouraging decline in Covid deaths, another school of thought suggests that Covid has simply morphed into a new kind of fatal illness.
“Before everyone was vaccinated or had been infected, 80 or 90% of Covid looked exactly same. They had terrible pneumonia. They were in the ICU on respiratory support,” said Dr. Jeremy Faust, an emergency medicine physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an instructor at Harvard Medical School in Boston.
Now, he said, “Covid deaths don’t all look the same.” While “baked-in immunity” may keep the most severe cases at a minimum, it is clear that Covid can wreak havoc on the body long after the infection has cleared.
“Somebody could have Covid and have a heart attack, and the primary cause of death is listed as a heart attack because that’s what really brought them to the hospital,” Faust said.
But, he added, “we’ll never know to what degree Covid triggered that heart attack.”
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Wednesday authorized updated COVID-19 booster shots specifically targeting a subvariant of omicron.
The move comes ahead of a fall campaign to give Americans booster shots, which is expected to launch in the coming days.
The move marks the first time the vaccines have been updated since the first shots were cleared at the end of 2020, and the updated shots are designed to catch up to evolutions in the virus.
The shots from Pfizer and Moderna target the omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5, as well as the original virus.
The shots can begin going into arms once the final step in the process, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention committee, clears them, which is expected to occur on Thursday.
A major question, though, is how many people will actually want the new shots, given that uptake for the existing booster shots has lagged.
Only about half of people who got the first two shots received the initial booster dose.
“The COVID-19 vaccines, including boosters, continue to save countless lives and prevent the most serious outcomes (hospitalization and death) of COVID-19,” said FDA Commissioner Robert Califf. “As we head into fall and begin to spend more time indoors, we strongly encourage anyone who is eligible to consider receiving a booster dose with a bivalent COVID-19 vaccine to provide better protection against currently circulating variants.”
Seeking to keep up with the ever-evolving virus, the FDA did not wait for the time-consuming process of going through full clinical trials on this tweaked vaccine. But it noted that it is highly confident that the vaccines are safe and effective. The agency pointed to the millions of doses of the original vaccines that have been given, as well as data from another version of the updated vaccine, along with preliminary data on this one.
Peter Marks, a top FDA vaccine official, compared the process to the annual updates to the flu vaccine that seek to adapt to the changes in that virus.
“The public can be assured that a great deal of care has been taken by the FDA to ensure that these bivalent COVID-19 vaccines meet our rigorous safety, effectiveness and manufacturing quality standards for emergency use authorization,” Marks said.
The updated Moderna vaccine is cleared for people 18 and older, and the Pfizer vaccine for people 12 and older.
For both, people are eligible for the booster shot of the updated vaccine if it has been at least two months since their last shot.
COVID-19 cases have risen in the U.S. to around 100,000 per day, and the real number could be as much as five times that, given many go unreported.
But the situation is far different from the early months of the pandemic. There are now vaccines and booster shots, and new treatments that dramatically cut the risk of the virus. So how much do cases alone still matter?
That question has prompted debate among experts, even as much of America goes on with their lives, despite the recent surge in cases.
How much concern high case numbers alone should prompt is “the trillion-dollar question,” said Bob Wachter, chair of the department of medicine at the University of California-San Francisco.
In the early days of the pandemic, dying of COVID-19 was a concern for him, but now, in an era of vaccines and treatments, “it doesn’t even cross my mind anymore,” he said.
But he noted there are other risks, including long COVID-19: symptoms like fatigue or difficulty concentrating that can linger for months.
“I think long COVID is pretty scary,” he said.
While cases have risen to around 100,000 reported per day, deaths have stayed flat, a testament to the power of vaccines and booster shots in preventing severe illness, as well as the Pfizer treatment pills Paxlovid, which cut the risk of hospitalization or death by around 90 percent.
Hospitalizations have risen, but only modestly, to around 27,000, one of the lowest points of the pandemic, according to a New York Times tracker.
Cases have now been “partially decoupled” from causing hospitalizations and deaths, said Preeti Malani, an infectious disease expert at the University of Michigan, such that hospitals are no longer overwhelmed.
“[Cases are] not without any consequence, but in terms of pressure on the health system, so far we’re not seeing that, which is really what drove all of this,” she said.
The behavior of much of America reflects a lessened concern about the risk of being infected. Restaurants and bars are packed. Many people do not wear masks even on airplanes or on the subway.
An Axios-Ipsos poll in May found just 36 percent of Americans said there was significant risk in returning to their “normal pre-coronavirus life.”
In the Biden administration, health officials are still advising people to wear masks in areas the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention classifies as at “high” risk. But President Biden himself is talking about the virus far less than he did at the start of his administration, and is not making sustained calls for people to wear masks.
White House COVID-19 response coordinator Ashish Jha touted progress in defanging cases on Thursday.
“We see cases rising, nearly 100,000 cases a day, and yet we’re still seeing death numbers that are substantially, about 90 percent lower, than where they were when the president first took office,” he told reporters.
Some experts are pushing back on the deemphasis of case numbers, saying they still matter.
“The bunk that cases are not important is preposterous,” Eric Topol, professor of molecular medicine at Scripps Research, wrote last month. “They are infections that beget more cases, they beget Long Covid, they beget sickness, hospitalizations and deaths. They are also the underpinning of new variants.”
Even if one does not get severely ill oneself, more cases mean more chances for the virus to spread on to someone who is more vulnerable, like the elderly or immunocompromised.
While deaths are way down from their peak earlier in the pandemic, there are still around 300 people dying from the virus every day, a number that would have proved shocking in a pre-COVID-19 world.
Leana Wen, a public health professor at George Washington University, recommended that people take a rapid test before visiting a more vulnerable person, as a safeguard that avoids more burdensome restrictions.
“Cases alone do not tell the whole story,” she said, adding, “As a policy matter we need to stop using the same comparisons we were in 2020 and 2021.”
There is still much that is unknown about long COVID-19, one of the biggest risks remaining for healthy, younger people who are vaccinated.
A recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Association estimated 10 percent to 30 percent of COVID-19 infections result in long COVID-19 symptoms, but there is no precise estimate.
Experts also urge people who have not gotten their booster shots, or not been vaccinated at all, to do so, given that many are more vulnerable to the virus if they are not up-to-date on their shots.
A new variant also always holds the risk of upending the current risk-benefit calculations. The virus has continued to evolve to spread more easily, and a future mutation could cause more severe illness or more greatly evade vaccines.
Pfizer and Moderna are working on updated vaccines to better target the omicron variant, but the Biden administration warns it will not have enough money to purchase those new vaccines for all Americans this fall unless Congress provides more funding. The funding request has been stalled for months, though, itself a sign of the reduced sense of urgency around the virus fight.
At least for now, though, while many people are getting COVID-19, fewer are getting extremely sick.
“It’s a very risky time if you don’t want to get COVID [at all],” Wachter said. “But a relatively less risky time if your goal is to not get severe COVID or die.”
A friend called me for medical advice two weeks ago. He’s single, in his thirties and generally healthy, but he’d developed a dry cough with mild congestion. After a self-administered Covid-19 test turned up negative results, he remained suspicious he could be infected.
He was set to fly west in a couple of days for a conference and dreaded the thought of infecting other passengers. I recommended a PCR test if he wanted to be more certain. When the lab results came back positive, he spent the next five days at home alone (per CDC guidance).
If you were in his shoes, chances are you, too, would make a reasonable effort to avoid infecting others. In the near future, that won’t be the case.
Americans are playing it safe—for now
A whopping 91% of Americans no longer consider Covid-19 a “serious crisis.” Social distancing has reached a low point as public-health restrictions continue to ease up.
Yet, there’s still one aspect of the pandemic Americans are taking very seriously.
As a society, we still expect people who test positive for Covid-19 to stay home and minimize contact with others. As a result of these expectations, 4 in 10 workers (including 6 in 10 low-income employees) have missed work in 2022. Overall, the nation’s No. 1 concern related to Omicron is “spreading the virus to people who are at higher risk of serious illness.”
Most Americans are eager to move on from the pandemic, but those who are sick continue to avoid actions that may potentially spread the virus.
Call it what you will—group think, peer pressure or the fear of violating cultural taboos—people don’t want to put others in harm’s way. That’s true, according to polls, regardless of one’s party affiliation or vaccination status.
What’s immoral today will be appropriate tomorrow
Don’t get used to these polite and socially conscious behaviors. All of it is about to change in the not-distant future. Let me paint a picture of tomorrow’s new normal:
A factory worker tests positive over the weekend for Covid-19 and comes to work on Monday without a mask, informing no one of his infection.
A vacationer with mild Covid-19 symptoms refuses to postpone her spa weekend, availing herself of massages, facials and group yoga classes.
A couple plans an indoor wedding for 200-plus, knowing the odds are likely that dozens of people will get infected and that some of those guests will be elderly and immunosuppressed.
These actions, which seem inappropriate and immoral now, will become typical. It’s not that people will suddenly become less empathetic or more callous. They’ll simply be adjusting to new social mores, brought about by a unique viral strain and an inevitable evolution in American culture.
A crash course in a unique virus
To understand why people will behave in ways that seem so unacceptable today, you must understand how the Omicron variant spreads compared to other viruses.
Scientists now know that Omicron (and its many decimal-laden strains: BA.2, BA.2.12.1, BA.4, BA.5, etc.) is the most infectious, fastest-spreading respiratory virus in world history. The Mayo Clinic calls this Covid-19 variant “hyper-contagious.”
“A single case could give rise to six cases after four days, 36 cases after eight days, and 216 cases after 12 days,” according to a report in Scientific American. As a result, researchers predict that 100 million Americans will become infected with Omicron this year alone—via new infections, reinfections and vaccination breakthroughs.
In addition to Omicron’s high transmissibility, the virus is also season-less. Whereas influenza arrives each winter and exits in the spring, Americans will continue to experience high levels of Covid-19 infection year-round—at least for the foreseeable future.
With its 60-plus mutations, immense transmissibility and lack of seasonality, Omicron is an exceptional virus: one that will infect not only our respiratory systems but also our culture.
Over time, Omicron’s unique characteristics will drive Americans to deny and ignore the risks of infection. In the near future, they’ll make decisions and take actions that they’d presently deem wrong.
A culture shock is coming
Culture—which comprises the shared values, norms and beliefs of a group of people—doesn’t change because someone decides it should. It evolves because circumstances change.
The pandemic has no doubt been a culture-changing event and, as the circumstances of Covid-19 have changed, so too have our underlying values, beliefs and behaviors.
If 100 million Americans (one-third of the population) were to become infected with Omicron this year, we can expect that everyone will know someone with the disease. And when dozens of our friends or colleagues say they’ve had it, we will begin to see transmission as inevitable. And since, statistically, most Americans won’t die from Omicron, people will see infection as relatively harmless and they’ll be willing to drop their guard.
We’ll see more and more people going to work even when they’re infected. We’ll see more people on trains and planes, coughing and congested, having never taken a Covid-19 test. And we’ll see large, indoor celebrations taking place without any added safety measures, despite the risks to the most vulnerable attendees.
Amid these changes, health officials will continue to urge caution, just as they have for more than two years. But it won’t make a difference. Culture eats science for breakfast. Americans will increasingly follow the herd and stop heeding public-safety warnings.
The process of change has begun
Cultural shifts happen in steps. First, a few people break the rules and then others follow.
Recall my friend, the one who took two tests out of an abundance of caution. Next time, perhaps he’ll decide he’d rather not miss the conference. Perhaps when he returns home, he will tell his friends that he felt sick the whole trip. Perhaps they’ll ask, “Do you think you might have had Covid?” And perhaps he will reply: “What difference would it have made? I’m fully vaccinated and boosted.”
And so, it will go. The next time someone in his social circle feels under the weather, he or she won’t even bother to do the first test.
This change process has already begun. Take the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, for example. Last year, the event was cancelled. This year, guests had to show proof of vaccination or a negative same-day test. However, that rule didn’t apply to staff at the hotel who worked the event. Unsurprisingly, several high-profile attendees got Covid-19 but, so far, no reports of anyone being hospitalized. A year from now, assuming no major mutations cause the virus to become more lethal, we can expect all restrictions will be dropped.
Culture dictates how people behave. It influences their thoughts and actions. It alters their values and beliefs. The unique characteristics of Omicron will lead people to ignore the harm it inflicts. They won’t act with malicious intent. They’ll just be oblivious to the consequences of their actions. That’s how culture works.
City strongly recommends masks in public indoor places for now
About 8% of people tested for Covid in city have been positive
New York City is preparing to hit a high Covid-transmission level in the coming days that would have it reconsidering mask requirements in public places.
“If NYC’s Alert Level is raised to High, the City will consider requiring face masks in all public indoor settings,” according to guidance on the city health department’s website.
New cases per 100,000 people over the last seven days surpassed 300 citywide, with Staten Island the highest at 390, followed by Manhattan at about 366. A month ago, the citywide rate was less than 200 per 100,000. About 8% of people tested for Covid-19 over the last seven days have been positive.
Earlier in May the city moved to a medium alert from low.
“New York City is preparing to potentially enter a high COVID-19 alert level in the coming days and strongly recommends that all New Yorkers mask up in public indoor settings to protect themselves and others,” according to a statement Monday from Mayor Eric Adams’s office.
A high level is reached when new Covid hospital admissions over seven days surpass 10 per 100,000 and the percentage of staffed inpatient beds occupied by Covid-19 patients is greater than 10%, according to guidance from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Masks Indoors
New York City’s new admissions are at 9.2 per 100,000 and increasing, while 3.85% of inpatients beds were occupied by Covid-19 patients as of May 10.
Under a high alert level, in addition to masking indoors, New Yorkers are recommended to limit gatherings to small numbers and get tested if they have symptoms, were exposed, traveled or were at a large event.
The city is distributing 16.5 million at-home Covid tests over the next month in an effort to prepare for another wave. The increase in tests will bring the total amount distributed to more than 36 million.
Most of the US remained at a low Covid community transmission-level as of May 12, with medium and high alerts mostly concentrated in the northeast, CDC data show. The nationwide case rate is 185 per 100,000 in the past seven days, up from 66 a month earlier. The rate surged to more than 1,700 per 100,000 during the omicron surge in January.
Unvaccinated people accounted for the overwhelming majority of deaths in the United States throughout much of the coronavirus pandemic. But that has changed in recent months, according to a Washington Post analysis of state and federal data.
The pandemic’s toll is no longer falling almost exclusively on those who chose not to or could not get shots, with vaccine protection waning over time and the elderly and immunocompromised — who are at greatest risk of succumbing to covid-19, even if vaccinated — having a harder time dodging increasingly contagious strains.
The vaccinated made up 42 percent of fatalities in January and February during the highly contagious omicron variant’s surge, compared with 23 percent of the dead in September, the peak of the delta wave, according to nationwide data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analyzed by The Post. The data is based on the date of infection and limited to a sampling of cases in which vaccination status was known.
As a group, the unvaccinated remain far more vulnerable to the worst consequences of infection — and are far more likely to die — than people who are vaccinated, and they are especially more at risk than people who have received a booster shot.
“It’s still absolutely more dangerous to be unvaccinated than vaccinated,” said Andrew Noymer, a public health professor at the University of California at Irvine who studies covid-19 mortality.“A pandemic of — and by — the unvaccinated is not correct. People still need to take care in terms of prevention and action if they became symptomatic.”
A key explanation for the rise in deaths among the vaccinated is that covid-19 fatalities are again concentrated among the elderly.
Nearly two-thirds of the people who died during the omicron surge were 75 and older, according to a Post analysis, compared with a third during the delta wave. Seniors are overwhelmingly immunized, but vaccines are less effective and their potency wanes over time in older age groups.
Experts say they are not surprised that vaccinated seniors are making up a greater share of the dead, even as vaccine holdouts died far more often than the vaccinated during the omicron surge, according to the CDC. As more people are infected with the virus, the more people it will kill, including a greater number who are vaccinated but among the most vulnerable.
The bulk of vaccinated deaths are among people who did not get a booster shot, according to state data provided to The Post. In two of the states, California and Mississippi, three-quarters of the vaccinated senior citizens who died in January and February did not have booster doses. Regulators in recent weeks have authorized second booster doses for people over the age of 50, but administration of first booster doses has stagnated.
Even though the death rates for the vaccinated elderly and immunocompromised are low, their losses numbered in the thousands when cases exploded, leaving behind blindsided families. But experts say the rising number of vaccinated people dying should not cause panic in those who got shots, the vast majority of whom will survive infections. Instead, they say, these deaths serve as a reminder that vaccines are not foolproof and that those in high-risk groups should consider getting boosted and taking extra precautions during surges.
“Vaccines are one of the most important and longest-lasting tools we have to protect ourselves,” said California State Epidemiologist Erica Pan, citing state estimates showing vaccines have shown to be 85 percent effective in preventing death.
“Unfortunately, that does leave another 15,” she said.
‘He did not expect to be sick’
Arianne Bennett recalled her husband, Scott Bennett, saying, “But I’m vaxxed. But I’m vaxxed,” from the D.C. hospital bed where he struggled to fight off covid-19 this winter.
Friends had a hard time believing Bennett, co-founder of the D.C.-based chain Amsterdam Falafelshop, was 70. The adventurous longtime entrepreneur hoped to buy a bar and planned to resume scuba-diving trips and 40-mile bike rides to George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate.
Bennett went to get his booster in early December after returning to D.C. from a lodge he owned in the Poconos, where he and his wife hunkered down for fall. Just a few days after his shot, Bennett began experiencing covid-19 symptoms, meaning he was probably exposed before the extra dose of immunity could kick in. His wife suspects he was infected at a dinner where he and his server were unmasked at times.
A fever-stricken Bennett limped into the hospital alongside his wife, who was also infected, a week before Christmas. He died Jan. 13, among the 125,000 Americans who succumbed to covid-19 in January and February.
“He was absolutely shocked. He did not expect to be sick. He really thought he was safe,’” Arianne Bennett recalled. “And I’m like, ‘But baby, you’ve got to wear the mask all the time. All the time. Up over your nose.’”
Jason Salemi, an epidemiologist at the University of South Florida College of Public Health, said the deaths of vaccinated people are among the consequences of a pandemic response that emphasizes individuals protecting themselves.
“When we are not taking this collective effort to curb community spread of the virus, the virus has proven time and time again it’s really good at finding that subset of vulnerable people,” Salemi said.
While experts say even the medically vulnerable should feel assured that a vaccine will probably save their lives, they should remain vigilant for signs of infection. As more therapeutics become available, early detection and treatment is key.
When Wayne Perkey, 84, first started sneezing and feeling other cold symptoms in early February, he resisted his physician daughter’s plea to get tested for the coronavirus.
The legendary former morning radio host in Louisville had been boosted in October. He diligently wore a mask and kept his social engagements to a minimum. It must have been the common cold or allergies, he believed. Even the physician who ordered a chest X-ray and had no coronavirus tests on hand thought so.
Perkey relented, and the test came back positive. He didn’t think he needed to go to the hospital, even as his oxygen levels declined.
“In his last voice conversation with me, he said, ‘I thought I was doing everything right,’” recalled Lady Booth Olson, another daughter, who lives in Virginia. “I believe society is getting complacent, and clearly somebody he was around was carrying the virus. … We’ll never know.”
From his hospital bed, Perkey resumed a familiar role as a high-profile proponent for vaccines and coronavirus precautions. He was familiar to many Kentuckians who grew up hearing his voice on the radio and watched him host the televised annual Crusade for Children fundraiser. He spent much of the pandemic as a caregiver to his ex-wife who struggled with chronic fatigue and other long-haul covid symptoms.
“It’s the 7th day of my Covid battle, the worst day so far, and my anger boils when I hear deniers talk about banning masks or social distancing,” Perkey wrote on Facebook on Feb. 16, almost exactly one year after he posted about getting his first shot. “I remember times we cared about our neighbors.”
In messages to a family group chat, he struck an optimistic note. “Thanks for all the love and positive energy,” he texted on Feb. 23. “Wear your mask.”
As is often the case for covid-19 patients, his condition rapidly turned for the worse. His daughter Rebecca Booth, the physician, suspects a previous bout with leukemia made it harder for his immune system to fight off the virus. He died March 6.
“Really and truly his final days were about, ‘This virus is bad news.’ He basically was saying: ‘Get vaccinated. Be careful. But there is no guarantee,’” Rebecca Booth said. “And, ‘If you think this isn’t a really bad virus, look at me.’ And it is.”
Hospitals, particularly in highly vaccinated areas, have also seen a shift from covid wards filled predominantly with the unvaccinated. Many who end up in the hospital have other conditions that weakens the shield afforded by the vaccine.
Vaccinated people made up slightly less than half the patients in the intensive care units of Kaiser Permanente’s Northern California hospital system in December and January, according to a spokesman.
Gregory Marelich, chair of critical care for the 21 hospitals in that system, said most of the vaccinated and boosted people he saw in ICUs were immunosuppressed, usually after organ transplants or because of medications for diseases such as lupus or rheumatoid arthritis.
“I’ve cared for patients who are vaccinated and immunosuppressed and are in disbelief when they come down with covid,” Marelich said.
‘There’s life potential in those people’
Jessica Estep, 41, rang a bell celebrating her last treatment for follicular lymphoma in September. The single mother of two teenagers had settled into a new home in Michigan, near the Indiana border. After her first marriage ended, she found love again and got married in a zoo in November.
As an asthmatic cancer survivor, Estep knew she faced a heightened riskfrom covid-19, relatives said. She saw only a tight circle of friends and worked in her own office in her electronics repair job. She lived in an area where around 1 in 4 residents are fully vaccinated. She planned to get a booster shot in the winter.
“She was the most nonjudgmental person I know,” said her mother, Vickie Estep. “It was okay with her if people didn’t mask up or get vaccinated. It was okay with her that they exercised their right of choice, but she just wanted them to do that away from her so that she could be safe.”
With Michigan battling back-to-back surges of the delta and omicron variants, Jessica Estep wasn’t able to dodge the virus any longer — she fell ill in mid-December. After surviving a cancer doctors described as incurable, Estep died Jan. 27. Physicians said the coronavirus essentially turned her lungs into concrete, her mother said.
Estep’s 14-year-old daughter now lives with her grandparents. Her widower returned to Indianapolis just months after he moved to Michigan to be with his new wife.
Her family shared her story with a local television station in hopes of inspiring others to get vaccinated, to protect people such as Estep who could not rely on their own vaccination as a foolproof shield. In response to the station’s Facebook post about the story, several commenters shrugged off their pleas and insinuated it was the vaccines rather than covid causing deaths.
Immunocompromised people and those with other underlying conditions are worth protecting, Vickie Estep said. “There’s life potential in those people.”
A delayed shot
As Arianne Bennett navigates life without her husband, she hopes the lesson people heed from his death is to take advantage of all tools available to mitigate a virus that still finds and kills the vulnerable, including by getting boosters.
Bennett wore a music festival shirt her husband gave her as she walked into a grocery store to get her third shot in March. Her husband urged her to get one when they returned to D.C., but she became sick at the same time he did. She scheduled the appointment for the earliest she could get the shot: 90 days after receiving monoclonal antibodies to treat the disease.
“My booster! Yay!” Bennett exclaimed in her chair as the pharmacist presented an updated vaccine card.
“It’s been challenging, but we got through it,” the pharmacist said, unaware of Scott Bennett’s death.
Tears welled in Bennett’s eyes as the needle went in her left arm, just over a year after she and her husband received their first shots.
“Last time we got it, we took selfies: ‘Look, we had vaccines,’” Bennett said, beginning to sob. “This one leaves me crying, missing him so much.”
The pharmacist leaned over and gave Bennett a hug in her chair.
“He would want you to do this,” the pharmacist said. “You have to know.”
Methodology
Death rates compare the number of deaths in various groups with an adjustment for the number of people in each group. The death rates listed for the fully vaccinated, the unvaccinated and those vaccinated with boosters were calculated by the CDC using a sample of deaths from 23 health departments in the country that record vaccine status, including boosters, for deaths related to covid-19. The CDC study assigns deaths to the month when a patient contracted covid-19, not the month of death. The latest data published in April reflected deaths of people who contracted covid as of February. The CDC study of deaths among the vaccinated is online, and the data can be downloaded.
The death rates for fully vaccinated people, unvaccinated people and fully vaccinated people who received an additional booster are expressed as deaths per 100,000 people. The death rates are also called incidence rates. The CDC estimated the population sizes from census data and vaccination records. The study does not include partially vaccinated people in the deaths or population. The CDC adjusted the population sizes for inaccuracies in the vaccination data. The death data is provisional and subject to change. The study sample includes the population eligible for boosters, which was originally 18 and older, and now is 12 and older.
To compare death rates between groups with different vaccination status, the CDC uses incidence rate ratios. For example, if one group has a rate of 10 deaths per 100,000 people, the death incidence rate would be 10. Another group may have a death incidence rate of 2.5. The ratio between the first group and the second group is the rate of 10 divided by the rate of 2.5, so the incidence rate ratio would be 4 (10÷2.5=4). That means the first group dies at a rate four times that of the second group.
The CDC calculates the death incidence rates and incidence rate ratios by age groups. It also calculates a value for the entire population adjusted for the size of the population in each age group. The Post used those age-adjusted total death incidence rates and incidence rate ratios.
The Post calculated the share of deaths by vaccine status from the sample of death records the CDC used to calculate death incidence rates by vaccine status. As of April, that data included 44,000 deaths of people who contracted covid in January and February.
The share of deaths for each vaccine status does not include deaths for partially vaccinated people because they are not included in the CDC data.
The Post calculated the share of deaths in each age group from provisional covid-19 death records that have age details from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics. That data assigns deaths by the date of death, not the date on which the person contracted covid-19. That data does not include any information on vaccine status of the people who died.
The United States is finally “out of the pandemic phase,” the country’s top infectious disease expert said, as cases and hospitalizations are notably down and mask mandates are all but extinct.
While there are still new infections spreading throughout the country – an average of 50,000 per day as of Tuesday – the country is far from the heights of the pandemic, when daily case counts surpassed 1 million. Restrictions, too, are easing as many Americans appear to be putting the pandemic behind them. Masking requirements have been lifted across most of the country, and officials stopped enforcing a federal mask mandate in transportation settings after a judge struck down the requirement.
“We are certainly right now in this country out of the pandemic phase,” Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, said Tuesday evening on PBS’s “NewsHour.”
Fauci said the United States was no longer seeing “tens and tens and tens of thousands of hospitalizations and thousands of deaths. We are at a low level right now.”
During the pandemic’s darkest moments, many wondered when the country would officially declare itself past the nationwide disaster, which has killed nearly 1 million Americans.
Fauci’s comments are likely to fuel debate about whether this is truly the moment: New cases are on the rise in the United States, and deaths are down, though they often lag spikes in cases. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday that as of the end of February, nearly 60 percent of Americans – including three out of every four children – have been infected with the coronavirus. But officials cautioned that the data did not indicate that Americans have widespread immunity against the virus because of their prior infections.
While previous infections are believed to offer some protection against serious disease for most people, health experts say the best protection against infection and serious disease or death from the coronavirus is vaccination.
The coronavirus will not be eradicated, Fauci said, but can be handled if its level of spread is kept “very low” and people are “intermittently” vaccinated, though he said he did not know how frequently. And Fauci echoed warnings from the World Health Organization and the United Nations this month that worldwide, the pandemic is far from over as vaccinations lag, particularly in developing nations.
The Biden administration, meanwhile, is appealing a ruling by a Trump-appointed federal judge that struck down the federal mask mandate on transit, including on planes, though it is unclear whether they will be successful, and likely face an American public that could be unwilling to comply again.
And in a less-than-subtle reminder that the coronavirus is still hanging around, the White House on Tuesday announced arguably the nation’s highest-profile coronavirus infection since former president Donald Trump, saying that Vice President Kamala Harris had tested positive and was asymptomatic. She was not considered in close contact to Biden, the White House said.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) is appealing a Florida judge’s Monday decision to strike down the mask requirement for public transportation. Federal judge Kathryn Mizelle ruled the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) exceeded its authority under the Public Health Service Act of 1944. Meanwhile, giddy passengers and flight crew have been discarding their face coverings as airlines, the Transportation Safety Administration, several local transit authorities, Uber and Lyft, all removed their mask requirements.
The Gist: Despite DOJ’s appeal, which appears to be aimed at preserving its own authority to act during health crises, rather than reinstating the current mask requirement (which was set to expire in two weeks anyway), the tone of the Biden administration is clearly shifting. Earlier this week President Biden told reporters that the decision to wear a mask is “up to them,” meaning individual Americans.
In the bumpy transition out of the emergency phase of the pandemic, we now have a patchwork of rules for masking. This is even true within healthcare facilities: some, including Houston Methodist and Iowa-based UnityPoint Health, are no longer requiring masks for visitors or employees who are not involved in patient care.
With COVID cases now rising in 41 states as mask mandates fall, the next month will prove critical in determining whether “endemic” COVID remains manageable, or once again stresses the healthcare system and other critical infrastructure.
But officials caution that people should not presume they have protection against the virus going forward.
Before omicron, one-third of Americans had been infected with the coronavirus, but by the end of February, that rate had climbed to nearly 60 percent — including about 75 percent of kids and 60 percent of people age 18 to 49, according to federal health data released Tuesday.
The data from blood tests offers the first evidence that over half the U.S. population, or 189 million people have been infected at least once since the pandemic began — double the number reflected in official case counts. Officials cautioned, however, that the data, in a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, does not indicate people have protection against the virus going forward, especially against increasingly transmissible variants.
“We continue to recommend that everyone be up to date on their vaccinations, get your primary series and booster, when eligible,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said during a media briefing.
Kristie Clarke, the CDC official who authored the report, said by February, “evidence of previous COVID-19 infections substantially increased among every age group, likely reflecting the increase in cases we noted as omicron surged in this country.”
Clarke said the greatest increases took place in those with the lowest levels of vaccination, noting that older adults were more likely to be fully vaccinated.
The largest increases were in children and teenagers through age 17 — about 75 percent of them had been infected by February, based on blood samples that look at antibodies developed in response to a coronavirus infection but not in response to vaccination. That’s about 58 million children.
The blood test data suggests 189 million Americans had covid-19 by end of February, well over double the 80 million cases shown by The Washington Post case tracker, which is based on state data of confirmed infections. Clarke said that’s because the blood tests captures asymptomatic cases and others that were never confirmed on coronavirus tests.
With the omicron surge, officials had expected there would be more infections. “But I didn’t expect the increase to be quite this much,” Clarke added.
Separately, CDC is about to publish another study that estimates three infections for every reported case, she said.
Atul Gawande leads global health and is co-chair of the Covid-19 Task Force at the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Nearly a year ago, President Biden announced that the United States would be the “arsenal of vaccines for the world,” just as America served as an arsenal for democracies during World War II. With the president’s leadership and the consistent bipartisan support of Congress, the United States has delivered more than half a billion coronavirus vaccines to 114 lower-income countries free of charge, a historic accomplishment. This example spurred contributions from other wealthy nations and contributed to vaccination of almost 60 percent of the world.
But the global battle against covid-19 is not done. Instead, the challenge has changed. The lowest-income countries, where vaccinations have reached less than 15 percent of people, are now declining free vaccine supply because they don’t have the capacity to get shots in arms fast enough.
We must therefore not just provide an arsenal; to protect our allies against future variants, we must also provide the support they need to ramp up their vaccination campaigns. That effort requires money, and despite generously funding our covid-19 response up to this point, Congress is now failing to provide the resources we need.
I am writing to say: This bodes serious trouble for the world.
Despite a period of relative calm here at home, we’re again seeing cases and hospitalizations spike in Europe and Asia, even in places with higher levels of vaccination than the United States. These surges are due to the more-transmissible BA.2 subvariant of the already highly infectious omicron strain. Without additional funding, we risk not having the tools we need — vaccines, treatments, tests, masks and more — to manage future surges at home. And no less troubling, if we don’t close the vaccine gap between richer and poorer countries, we will give the virus more chances to mutate into a new variant.
Since the virus first emerged, the package of tools we’ve developed to fight it has proved resilient against all coronavirus variants. But there’s no guarantee that will remain true. A new variant that evades our defenses might once again fuel new surges of severe illness and batter the global economy. Helping all countries protect their populations by supercharging vaccination campaigns is our best hope to prevent future strains from emerging and ending this pandemic once and for all.
Turning vaccines into actual vaccinations has been difficult even in wealthy countries, where capable health systems, state-of-the-art cold chains and public awareness campaigns mean that anyone who wants a vaccine can get one. In countries without strong health infrastructure — without enough freezers and refrigerated trucks to keep vaccines from spoiling or enough health-care workers to reach rural populations living miles from the nearest health facility — it’s much tougher. We’ve also seen the same vaccine myths and disinformation that swirl through our media ecosystem spread just as rapidly through social media and hurt public trust abroad.
But we’ve also learned how to successfully tackle these challenges. In December, the Biden administration launched an initiative called Global VAX to help low-income countries train health workers, strengthen health infrastructure and raise vaccine access and awareness. While vaccine coverage in those countries remains far below the global average, the rapid progress we’ve supported in places such as Ivory Coast, Uganda and Zambia show what is possible when governments that are committed to fighting covid-19 have the global support they need.
Without more funding, we would have to halt our plans to expand the Global VAX initiative. The United States would have to turn its back on countries that need urgent help to boost their vaccination rates. And many countries that finally have the vaccines they need to protect their populations would risk seeing them spoil on the tarmac.
We can’t let this happen. It not only endangers people abroad but also risks the health and prosperity of all Americans. The virus is not waiting on Congress to negotiate; it is infecting people and mutating as we speak.
Over the past two years, both parties in Congress have repeatedly stepped up to fight covid-19 in an inspiring show of bipartisan unity. Now, we need our leaders to come together once more. With an effective strategy in place and the tools to transform covid-19 from a killer pandemic to a manageable respiratory disease, the United States has the expertise and capabilities the world needs to win the fight against this virus. We need Congress to let us take the fight to the front lines.
HENRY KOTULA 