U.S. COVID death toll hits 1,500 a day amid delta scourge
Brian Pierce, a coroner in Baldwin County, Ala., thought he had seen the last of the coronavirus months ago as the area’s death count held steady at 318 for most of the spring and summer. But then in July and August, the fatalities began mounting and last week, things got so bad the state rolled a trailer into his parking lot as a temporary morgue.
“I think most people were thinking, ‘We’re good,’ ” he said. “Life was almost back to normal. Now I’m telling my kids again to please stay home.”
Nationally, COVID-19 deaths have climbed steadily in recent weeks, hitting a
seven-day average of about 1,500 a day Thursday, after falling to the low 200s in early July — the latest handiwork of a contagious variant that has exploited the return to everyday activities by tens of millions of Americans, many of them unvaccinated.
What is different about this fourth pandemic wave in the United States is that the growing rates of vaccination and natural immunity have broken the relationship between infections and deaths in many areas.
The daily count of new infections is rising in almost every part of the country. But only some places — mostly Southern states with lower vaccination rates — are seeing a parallel surge in deaths. The seven-day average of daily deaths is about a third of what it was in January, the pandemic’s most deadly month, but is forecast to continue rising as high numbers of patients are hospitalized.
While most regions with increasing deaths have lower vaccination rates, that isn’t the case for all of them.
Florida, for example, where more than 53 percent of the population is fully vaccinated, is the worsthit state in terms of daily deaths, which have averaged 325 over the past week, alongside almost 20,000 new daily infections on average. Despite resistance from local school boards, Gov. Ron DeSantis has fought to enforce his ban on mask mandates and made good on a threat to withhold salaries from some of them this week even after a judge ruled the ban unconstitutional.
David Wesley Dowdy, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said the situation underscores the unanswered questions about the virus 18 months out — and the limitations of mathematical forecasting to predict the daily choices of 330 million Americans.
“The driving factor in the current wave is human behavior — how people interact and how people respond to risk — and that is really very unpredictable,” he said.
“We are in a perfect storm of viral changes and behavioral changes,” agreed Lauren Ancel Meyers, director of the University of Texas COVID-19 Modeling Consortium.
Virtually every time that humans have underestimated the virus, and let down their guard, deaths surged.
As of Thursday, the country has logged more than 640,000 deaths — and many experts believe we are not yet at the peak.
Ali Mokdad, a researcher at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington whose model is considered among the more optimistic, said that at least nine states may have reached, or passed, their peak for the delta variant — Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida in the South, along with Nevada and Hawaii — but that has little to do with policy changes or other major events.
Likely it’s more about “individual caution and (delta) running out of susceptible individuals,” he and his team wrote in a recent report.
Mokdad expects that states that have done better at curbing infections will experience a longer, albeit smaller wave, while those with rampant infections might start to see case declines shortly.
In total, the group projects between 116,000 to 210,000 new U.S. deaths before Dec. 1, based on delta's continued spread, a slow but steady increase in vaccinations, and no other threatening variants emerging.
That model also assumes that 56 percent of the population is immune to delta as a result of vaccinations and infections, and that 67 percent will be immune by Dec. 1. The next three months will be rough, however, with 44 states experiencing high stress on intensive care beds, he predicted.
“It’s counterintuitive,” Mokdad said. “In order for a state to peak and come down, you need fewer people susceptible to the virus. So states like Florida that have allowed the virus to circulate may be reaching that level through vaccines, plus people being infected.”
That model forecasts that deaths may rise to a peak by mid-September and slowly decline until Dec. 1. Several other models, including one from Los Alamos National Labs, forecast daily deaths rising into October.