OMICRON DEATHS HIGH AMONG OLDER PEOPLE
Despite strong levels of vaccination among older people, COVID-19 killed them at vastly higher rates during this winter’s Omicron wave than it did last year, preying on long delays since their last shots and the variant’s ability to skirt immune defenses.
This winter’s wave of deaths in older people belied the Omicron variant’s relative mildness. Almost as many Americans 65 and older died in four months of the Omicron surge as did in six months of the Delta wave, even though the Delta variant, for any one person, tended to cause more severe illness.
While overall per capita COVID-19 death rates have fallen, older people still account for an overwhelming share of them.
“This is not simply a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” said Andrew Stokes, an assistant professor in global health at Boston University who studies age patterns of COVID-19 deaths. “There’s still exceptionally high risk among older adults, even those with primary vaccine series.”
COVID-19 deaths, though always concentrated in older people, have in 2022 skewed toward older people more than they did at any point since vaccines became widely available.
That swing in the pandemic has intensified pressure on the Biden administration to protect older Americans, with health officials in recent weeks encouraging everyone 50 and older to get a second booster and introducing new models of distributing antiviral pills.
In much of the country, though, the booster campaign remains listless and disorganized, older people and their doctors said. Patients, many of whom struggle to drive or get online, have to maneuver through an often labyrinthine health care system to receive potentially lifesaving antivirals.
Nationwide COVID-19 deaths in recent weeks have been near the lowest levels of the pandemic, below an average of 400 a day. But the mortality gap between older and younger people has grown: Middle-aged Americans, who suffered a large share of pandemic deaths last summer and fall, are now benefiting from new stores of immune protection in the population as COVID-19 deaths once again cluster around older people.
And the new wave of Omicron subvariants may create additional threats: While hospitalizations in younger age groups have remained relatively low, admission rates among people 70 and older in the Northeast have climbed to onethird of the winter Omicron wave’s towering peak.