Americans still facing COVID risk

As the US approaches 1 million deaths from COVID-19, Americans are “still dealing with this virus”, as medical experts remain wary of the virus’ path.

As of Wednesday, the total number of deaths attributed to COVID in the US was 995,747, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Dr Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, recently said the US is much better off now than it was a year ago because of vaccines and booster shots, but “we are still dealing with this virus”.

“It’s not behind us,” said Fauci, who as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has been battling the virus since the onset of the pandemic in 2020. “We’re having a small bit of an uptick now. And we hope that we don’t see a major uptick as we get into the fall, but that remains to be seen.”

Driven by the BA.2 variant of Omicron, new confirmed cases in the US are on the rise again after a sharp drop in Omicron’s winter surge. The US is averaging 77,092 cases a day, up 52 percent from two weeks ago, according to a New York Times tracker.

Cases are climbing in all but seven states and territories, with more than a dozen states doubling the number of cases compared with two weeks ago.

“I know we all want to be done with COVID, but I don’t think it’s done with us,” Jessica Justman, associate professor of medicine in epidemiology and senior technical director of ICAP at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, told USA Today.

The Biden administration is preparing for the possibility that 100 million Americans — roughly 30 percent of the population — will be infected with the coronavirus this fall and winter, according to an administration official, The New York Times reported.

The number is based on a range of outside models, though the official who spoke on condition of anonymity did not specify which ones and assumes that a rapidly evolving virus in the Omicron family will spread through a population with waning immunity against infection.

Meanwhile, a team of experts from Johns Hopkins University told reporters Tuesday that, in the short term, a new surge isn’t expected to be as severe as previous waves. But they said that could change, WebMD Health News reported.

COVID-19 still kills an average of 300 Americans per day, said David Dowdy, associate professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. “People are still dying of COVID, and we can’t rule out the possibility of a major wave in the coming months,” he added.

He said the wave also could be underestimated as more people test at home without reporting their infections or are not testing.

The World Health Organization (WHO) Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus tweeted last week that COVID “will not be over anywhere until it’s over everywhere”.

He said the WHO was concerned at the number of countries “drastically” reducing testing and that it “inhibits our ability to see where the virus is, how it’s spreading and how it’s evolving”.

Another number — 9 million — reflects the actual impact of COVID, according to The Washington Post. That is the number of Americans who have lost spouses, parents, grandparents, siblings and children to COVID.

The number was derived from the work of sociologists at Penn State and the University of Southern California who developed a “bereavement multiplier”, a way to calculate how many close relatives each COVID death leaves behind and bereft.

On average, each COVID death leaves nine close relatives behind — not including extended family or close friends, longtime co-workers or next-door neighbors, the study said.

Since February 2020, COVID-19 has been listed as the underlying cause of death on at least 90 percent of those death certificates, according to the CDC. COVID quickly became the third-biggest killer of Americans, behind only heart disease and cancer, the CDC says.

COVID has caused mental and physical illnesses for millions of people who have survived it. The long-lasting impact the effects of the virus on many individuals’ mental and physical health is yet to be fully measured.

According to an American Psychological Association study, among those surveyed, anxiety rates during the pandemic jumped to 84 percent, while depression rose 72 percent. The number of people experiencing traumatic symptoms as a result of their own experiences or witnessing a loved one’s COVID illness and death increased to 62 percent.

Long COVID already may affect between 7 million and 23 million Americans who previously had the virus, or up to 7 percent of the US population, according to the US Government Accountability Office.

As many as 30 percent of people infected by the coronavirus are believed to develop long COVID, a condition that can last for several months with symptoms including fatigue, rapid heartbeat, shortness of breath, chronic pain, brain fog and muscle weakness, according to the CDC. It affects people with mild and severe COVID-19, including children, and it can be severe enough to keep people from work.

More than half of COVID survivors report symptoms that persist after six months, Penn State College of Medicine researchers reported last year.

“If the whole world was vaccinated tomorrow and we spent just three years ‘learning to live with COVID’ under the current [US public health] strategy, we could have well over a billion people living with long COVID,” Arijit Chakravarty, a COVID researcher and CEO of Fractal Therapeutics, a drug development firm, told Fortune magazine.

DAVID GOLDMAN / AP Karen McCulloch (left) and her daughter, Kirsten, hold a photo of Karen’s mother, Mary Jacq McCulloch who died of COVID-19, at the North Carolina Botanical Garden where they used to bring her on outings from her nursing home, on March 10, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.