Experts decry little action as COVID-19 cases surge
White House being called out for not reinforcing message
With new omicron variants again driving hospital admissions and deaths higher in recent weeks, states and cities are rethinking their responses and the White House is stepping up efforts to alert the public.
Some experts said the warnings are too little, too late.
The highly transmissible BA.5 variant now accounts for 65% of cases with its cousin BA.4 contributing another 16%. The variants have shown a remarkable ability to get around the protection offered by infection and vaccination.
“It’s well past the time when the warning could have been put out there,” said Dr. Eric Topol, head of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, who has called BA.5 “the worst variant yet.”
Global trends for the two mutants have been apparent for weeks, experts said — they quickly out-compete older variants and push cases higher wherever they appear. Yet Americans have tossed off their masks and jumped back into travel and social gatherings. And they have largely ignored booster shots, which protect against COVID-19’s worst outcomes. Courts have blocked federal mask and vaccine mandates, tying the hands of U.S. officials.
“We learn a lot from how the virus is acting elsewhere and we should apply the knowledge here,” said Ali Mokdad, a professor of health metrics sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle.
White House COVID-19 coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha appeared on TV Wednesday morning urging booster shots and renewed vigilance. Yet Mokdad said federal health officials need to push harder on masks indoors, early detection and prompt antiviral treatment.
The administration’s challenge, in the view of the White House, is people’s willingness to hear messaging amid pandemic fatigue and the politicization of the virus response.
For months, the White House has encouraged Americans to use of free or cheap at-home rapid tests to detect the virus, as well as the no-cost and highly-effective antiviral treatment Paxlovid. On Tuesday, the
White House called on all adults 50 and older to get a booster if they haven’t yet this year — and dissuaded people from waiting for the next generation of shots expected in the fall.
Los Angeles County, the nation’s largest by population, is facing a return to a broad indoor mask mandate if current trends in hospital admissions continue, health director Barbara Ferrer told county supervisors Tuesday.
The nation’s brief lull in COVID-19 deaths has reversed. The seven-day average for daily deaths in the U.S. rose 26% over the past two weeks to 489 on Tuesday.
The coronavirus is not killing nearly as many as it was last fall and winter, and experts do not expect death to reach those levels again soon. But hundreds of daily deaths for a summertime respiratory illness would normally be jaw-dropping, said Andrew Noymer, a public health professor at the University of California, Irvine. He noted that in Orange County, California, 46 people died of COVID-19 in June.
“That would be all hands on deck,” Noymer said. “People would be like, ‘There’s this crazy new flu that’s killing people.’ ”
Instead, proven precautions are not being taken. Vaccinations, including boosters for those eligible, lower the risk of hospitalization and death, even against the latest variants. But less than half of all eligible U.S. adults have gotten one booster, and only about 1 in 4 Americans age 50 and older eligible for a second booster have received one.
“This has been a botched booster campaign,” Topol said, noting that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still uses the term “fully vaccinated” for
people with two shots of Moderna or Pfizer. “They haven’t gotten across that two shots is totally inadequate,” he said.
Noymer said if he were in charge of the nation’s COVID-19 response he would level with the American people in an effort to get their attention. He would tell Americans to mask indoors and “until we get better vaccines, there’s going to be a new normal of a disease that kills over 100,000 Americans a year and impacts life expectancy.”
That message might not fly with people tired of taking precautions after the last two years. Valerie Walker of New Hope, Pennsylvania, is mindful of the latest surge but hardly alarmed.
“I was definitely concerned back then,” she said of the pandemic’s early days, with images of body bags on nightly broadcasts. “Now there’s fatigue, things were getting better and there was a vaccine. So I would say from a scale between 1 and 10, I’m probably at a 4.”