US to see a wave of omicron deaths
Estimate putting toll at 50,000 to 300,000 by middle of March
The fast-moving omicron variant may cause less severe disease on average, but COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. are climbing and modelers forecast 50,000 to 300,000 more Americans could die by the time the wave subsides in mid-March.
The estimate came as the Biden administration Tuesday quietly launched its website for Americans to request free at-home COVID-19 tests, a day before the site was scheduled to officially go online.
The website, COVIDTests.gov, now includes a link for Americans to access an order form run by the U.S. Postal Service. People can order four at-home tests per residential address, to be delivered by the Postal Service. It marks the latest step by President Joe Biden to address criticism of low inventory and long lines for testing during a nationwide surge in COVID-19 cases due to the omicron variant.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the website was in “beta testing” and operating at a “limited capacity” ahead of its official launch. The website will officially launch Wednesday, Psaki said.
There were isolated reports Tuesday of issues relating to the website’s address verification tool erroneously enforcing the four-per-household cap on apartment buildings and other multi-unit dwellings, but it was not clear how widespread the issue was.
At points Tuesday more than 750,000 people were accessing the website at the same time, according to public government tracking data, but it was not known how many orders were placed.
She added that the administration was anticipating a “bug or two,” but had IT experts from across the government working to get the site ready.
Biden announced last month that the U.S. would purchase 500 million at-home tests to launch the program and Thursday the president announced that he was doubling the order to 1 billion tests.
But Americans shouldn’t
expect a rapid turnaround on the orders, and they will have to plan ahead and request the tests well before they meet federal guidelines for when to use a test.
The White House said “tests will typically ship within 7-12 days of ordering” through USPS, which reports shipping times of 1-3 days for its first-class package service in the continental United States.
But initially, the effort to get tests in lots of people’s hands nationwide will likely be drawn out and not put much of a dent in the current surge.
The seven-day rolling average for daily new COVID-19 deaths in the U.S.
has been trending upward since mid-November, reaching nearly 1,700 on Jan. 17 — still below the peak of 3,300 in January 2021. COVID19 deaths among nursing home residents started rising slightly two weeks ago, although still at a rate 10 times less than last year before most residents were vaccinated.
Despite signs omicron causes milder disease on average, the unprecedented level of infection spreading through the country, with cases still soaring in many states, means many vulnerable people will become severely sick. If the higher end of projections comes to pass, that would push total
U.S. deaths from COVID19 over 1 million by early spring.
“A lot of people are still going to die because of how transmissible omicron has been,” said University of South Florida epidemiologist Jason Salemi. “It unfortunately is going to get worse before it gets better.”
But the notion that a generally less severe variant could still take the lives of thousands of people has been difficult for health experts to convey. The math of it — that a small percentage of a very high number of infections can yield a very high number of deaths — is difficult to visualize.
“Overall, you’re going to see more sick people even if you as an individual have a lower chance of being sick,” said Katriona Shea of Penn State University, who co-leads a team that pulls together several pandemic models and shares the combined projections with the White House.
The wave of deaths heading for the United States will crest in late January or early February, Shea said. In early February, weekly deaths could equal or exceed the delta peak and possibly even surpass the previous U.S. peak in deaths last year.
Some unknown portion of these deaths are among people infected with the delta variant, but experts say omicron is also claiming lives.
Yet, new evidence from nearly 70,000 patients in Southern California suggests omicron is causing milder illness than delta.
A study found patients with omicron had a 53% lower risk of hospitalization with respiratory symptoms, a 74% lower risk of ICU admission and a 91% lower risk of death. The study, which has not yet been peer reviewed, comes from researchers at Kaiser Permanente and University of California, Berkeley.
“It’s hard for me to say straight out it’s good news,” said study co-author Sara Y. Tartof, a Kaiser Permanente research scientist. “Maybe there’s good news in the sense that if you are infected your chance of becoming severely ill are decreased, but from a societal perspective it’s a very heavy burden for us. It remains a serious situation, and we need to maintain practices and behaviors we know protect us.”