COVID-19 deaths climb past 450K in U.S.
As the daily toll remains high, country rushing to catch up in effort to detect new mutations
Coronavirus deaths in the United States surpassed 450,000 on Thursday, and daily deaths remain stubbornly high at more than 3,000 a day, despite falling infections and the arrival of multiple vaccines.
And as the death toll mounts, the United States is rushing to catch up in the race to detect dangerous coronavirus mutations.
Infectious disease specialists expect deaths to start dropping soon, after new cases hit a peak right around the beginning of the year. New COVID-19 deaths could ebb as early as next week, said Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But there’s also the risk that improving trends in infections and hospitalizations could be offset by people relaxing and coming together — including this Sunday, to watch football, she added.
“I’m worried about Super Bowl Sunday, quite honestly,” Walensky said Thursday.
Walensky said one reason cases and hospitalizations are not rising as dramatically as they were weeks ago is because the effect of holiday gatherings has faded.
The effect on deaths is delayed. The daily toll amounts to 50,000 fatalities in the last two weeks.
“We’re still in quite a bad place,” she said.
The nation reported 3,912 COVID-19 deaths Wednesday, down from the pandemic peak of 4,466 deaths on Jan. 12.
The biggest driver to the U.S. death toll over the past month has been California, which has averaged more than 500 deaths per day in recent weeks.
Alabama is another hot spot. The seven-day rolling average of deaths there has risen over the past two weeks, from 74 to 147 deaths per day.
The hardest hit demographic groups continue to be the oldest and frailest, said Dr. Thomas Holland of Duke University.
When the coronavirus first swept through the country, it was concentrated in nursing homes, prisons and other congregate
care settings. It later spread more broadly.
“But deaths have still been concentrated among older patients and patients” with other health problems, Holland said. “Even as the pandemic has spread more broadly in the population, the demographics of who dies from COVID has not really changed.”
In Florida, for instance, 83 percent of deaths attributed to the virus have been in people 65 and older.
Still, that hasn’t been enough to inspire some people to wear masks. A recent viral video from Oakes Farms Seed to Table, a local grocery store in Naples, Fla., showed both maskless customers and employees, chatting and laughing, without any social distancing.
Alfie Oakes, the store’s owner, told NBC’s “Today” show he thinks masks do not work, and he does not believe the coronavirus has killed hundreds of thousands of people in the United States.
“That’s total hogwash,” Oakes said, adding: “Why don’t we shut the world down because of the heart attacks? Why don’t we lock down cities because of heart attacks?”
‘We have the tools’
As the death toll climbs, the United States is only beginning to catch up in the race to detect new mutations of the coronavirus.
The problem has not been a shortage of technology or expertise. Rather, scientists say, it’s an absence of national leadership and coordination, plus a lack of funding and supplies for overburdened laboratories trying to juggle diagnostic testing with the hunt for genetic changes.
“We have the brains. We have the tools. We have the instruments,” said Ilhem Messaoudi, director of a virus research center at University of California, Irvine. “It’s just a matter of supporting that effort.”
Viruses mutate constantly. To stay ahead of the threat, scientists analyze samples, watching closely for mutations that might make the coronavirus more infectious or more deadly.
But such testing has been scattershot.
Fewer than 1 percent of positive specimens in the United States are being sequenced to determine whether they have worrisome mutations. Other countries do better — Britain sequences about 10 percent — meaning they can more quickly see threats coming at them. That gives them greater opportunity to slow or stop the problem, whether through more targeted contact tracing, possible adjustments to the vaccine or public warnings.
CDC officials say variants have not driven recent surges in overall U.S. cases. But experts worry that what’s happening with variants is not clear and say the nation should have been more aggressive about sequencing earlier in the epidemic that has now killed over 455,000 Americans.
“If we had evidence it was changing,” said Ohio State molecular biologist Dan Jones, “maybe people would’ve acted differently.”
U.S. scientists have detected more than 500 cases of a variant first identified in Britain and expect it to become the cause of most of this country’s new infections in a matter of weeks. Another variant tied to Brazil and a third discovered in South Africa were detected last week in the United States and are expected to spread.
The British variant is more contagious and is believed to more deadly than the original, while the South Africa one may render the vaccines somewhat less effective. The ultimate fear is that a variant resistant to existing vaccines and treatments could eventually emerge.
‘Totally unacceptable’
Potentially worrisome versions may form inside the United States, too. “This virus is mutating, and it doesn’t care if it’s in Idaho or South Africa,” Messaoudi said.
After the slow start, public health labs in at least 33 states are now doing genetic analysis to identify emerging coronavirus variants. Other states have formed partnerships with university or private labs to do the work. North Dakota, which began sequencing last week, was the most recent to start that work, according to the Association of Public Health Laboratories.
The CDC believes a minimum of 5,000 to 10,000 samples should be analyzed weekly in the United States to adequately monitor variants, said Gregory Armstrong, who oversees the agency’s advanced molecular detection work. And it’s only now that the nation is hitting that level, he added.
President Joe Biden, who inherited the setup from the Trump administration, is proposing a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package that calls for boosting federal spending on sequencing of the virus, though the amount has not been detailed and other specifics have yet to be worked out.
“We’re 43rd in the world in genomic sequencing. Totally unacceptable,” White House coronavirus response coordinator Jeff Zients said.