The Morning Call

COVID-19 cases surging as Americans plan for summer

- By Caleb Jones and Stefanie Dazio

HONOLULU — A high school prom in Hawaii where masked dancers weren’t allowed to touch. A return to virtual city council meetings in one Colorado town after the mayor and others tested positive following an in-person session. A reinstated mask mandate at skilled nursing facilities in Los Angeles County after 22 new outbreaks in a single week.

A COVID-19 surge is underway that is starting to cause disruption­s as the school year wraps up and Americans prepare for summer vacations. Many people, though, have returned to their pre-pandemic routines and plans, which often involve travel.

Case counts are as high as they’ve been since mid-February and those figures are likely a major undercount because of unreported positive home test results and asymptomat­ic infections. Earlier this month, an influentia­l modeling group at the University of Washington in Seattle estimated that only 13% of cases were being reported to U.S. health authoritie­s.

Hospitaliz­ations are also up and more than one-third of the U.S. population lives in areas that are considered at high risk by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Northeast has been hit the hardest.

Yet vaccinatio­ns have stagnated and elected officials nationwide seem loath to impose new restrictio­ns on a public that’s ready to move on even as the U.S. death toll surpassed 1 million people less than 2 ½ years into the outbreak.

“People probably are underestim­ating the prevalence of COVID,” said Crystal Watson, public health lead in the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security’s Coronaviru­s Resource Center. “I think there’s a lot more virus out there than we recognize, and so people are much, much more likely than they anticipate to be exposed and infected.”

The seven-day rolling average for daily new cases in the U.S. — a major metric for the pandemic — skyrockete­d over the last two weeks, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. The figure was about 76,000 May 9 and jumped to nearly 109,000 Monday. That was the highest it had been since mid-February, when the omicron-fueled surge was winding down.

Deaths are still on the decline and hospital intensive care units aren’t swamped like they were at other times during the pandemic, likely because vaccinatio­ns and immunity from people who have already had the disease are keeping many cases less severe.

In Hawaii, which once had one of the nation’s lowest rates of infection, hospitaliz­ation and death, new cases are surging among the state’s 1.4 million residents.

With cases climbing for eight weeks in a row, Hawaii has the second-highest infection rate of any state, trailing only Rhode Island. But because positive home test results aren’t counted in official data, Hawaii’s health department estimates that the case count is actually five or six times higher.

Despite its surge, visitors have been flocking to Hawaii’s beaches, especially in recent months.

 ?? CALEB JONES/AP ?? Tourists sit Monday on Waikiki Beach in Honolulu. With cases climbing for eight consecutiv­e weeks, Hawaii has the second-highest infection rate among the 50 states.
CALEB JONES/AP Tourists sit Monday on Waikiki Beach in Honolulu. With cases climbing for eight consecutiv­e weeks, Hawaii has the second-highest infection rate among the 50 states.

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