1 million deaths doesn’t mean it’s over, either

Reaching 1 million COVID deaths in the U.S. is a stark reminder that the pandemic is far from over despite life-saving vaccines that have alleviated symptoms and slowed death rates worldwide.

A recent surge in cases across the country has been fueled by subvariants of the fast-spreading omicron strain that caused chaos last winter. But the news is not all bad.

“We will continue to see new variants. As long as those variants are hopefully sublineages of omicron, I think that’s better news for the future of the pandemic,” Dr. Crystal Watson of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security told the Daily News.

“Because what we’ve seen so far is that people developed this immunity to omicron, on top of large numbers of people who’ve been vaccinated.”

While omicron sent cases skyrocketing because it spread so easily, hospitalizations and deaths increased at slower rates. However, because so many people were infected, deaths from COVID still increased significantly.

But during the recent subvariant surge, severe cases are increasing at an even slower rate than in the winter.

“Cases in the U.S. in particular are rising, but we’re also fortunately seeing that (increase) even more decoupled from severe disease, hospitalizations and deaths than we have in previous surges,” Watson said. “It is not having as big an effect on our hospital systems and causing as many severe cases and deaths as previous surges. That’s good news.”

Globally, deaths and cases have been declining for weeks, making the U.S. increase something of an outlier, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center.

But the numbers are still significant, and the continued global spread of the disease increases the risk for new variants. Omicron was first detected in South Africa.

For many people, a two-year pandemic was unthinkable back in March 2020. But at Johns Hopkins and across the vast field of medical professionals, Watson and her colleagues remain prepared for the next evolution of the virus.

“We still need to be on the lookout for variants. Omicron originally kind of came out of nowhere,” Watson said.