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The US this week saw more than 100 million officially diagnosed and reported cases of Covid-19, but the number of Americans who have actually had the virus since the start of the pandemic is likely more than double that.
Covid-19 has easily infected more than 200 million in the US alone since the year the beginning of the pandemic — some people more than once. The virus continues to evolve into more transmissible variants that evade immunity from vaccination and prior infection, making transmission extremely difficult to control as we enter the fourth year of the pandemic.
The U.S. officially recorded more than 100 million cases on Tuesday, just under a third of the total population, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Scientists say the data is incomplete and likely far below the actual number of infections. Although it counts people who have tested positive more than once or have had Covid multiple times, it does not capture the number of Covid patients who were asymptomatic and never tested or tested at home and did not report it.
dr. Tom Frieden, former director of the CDC under the Obama administration, estimates that the reported figures reflect less than half of the actual amount.
“There have been at least 200 million infections in the U.S., so that’s a small fraction,” Frieden said. “The question is really whether we will be better prepared for covid and other health threats in the future, and the jury is still out on that,” he said.
CDC last spring estimated that almost 187 million people infected with Covid at least once in the US by February 2022, which is more than double the number of officially reported cases at that time. The estimate was based on a survey of commercial laboratory data, which showed that about 58% of Americans have antibodies due to the Covid infection. The study did not take into account reinfections or antibodies from vaccination.
The CDC then recorded more than 21 million confirmed cases from March to Dec. 21 of this year, though that’s an underestimate because people using rapid home tests aren’t captured in the data.
The more than 21 million additional confirmed cases on top of the CDC’s February estimate of about 187 million total infections brings the low estimate of more than 208 million infections since the pandemic began.
“It’s really hard to stop this virus, and that’s one of the reasons we focused on hospitalizations and deaths and not just case counts,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist and director of the pandemic center at Brown University School of Medicine in the US. Public health.
The US has made significant progress since the darkest days of the pandemic. Deaths have fallen by about 90% since the peak of the pandemic in January 2021, when more than 3,000 people succumbed to the virus daily before widespread vaccination. Daily hospital admissions fell 77% from a peak of more than 21,000 in January 2022 amid a huge surge in omicron.
Despite these advances, the number of deaths and hospitalizations remains persistently high given the widespread availability of vaccines and treatments. About 400 people still die from the virus a day, and about 5,000 are admitted to hospitals daily. The virus is still circulating at levels that would be considered high earlier in the pandemic, with an average of nearly 70,000 confirmed cases reported per day, a significant undercount due to at-home testing.
More than a million people have died from covid in the US since the start of the pandemic, more than any other country in the world.
“I think people have become hardened to it,” Frieden said of the Covid toll. “Covid is the new bad thing in our environment, and it’s likely to be here for the long term. We don’t know how this will evolve, whether it will become less virulent, more virulent – the years will be better and worse. “
Chief Medical Advisor to the White House, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who is stepping down this month, said the U.S. can consider a pandemic once the number of hospitalizations and deaths from the virus drops to a level similar to the burden of the flu.
First, two viruses are circulating simultaneously at high levels. From October to the first week of December, the flu killed 12,000 people, while covid claimed more than 27,000 lives in that period.
“We’re still in the middle of it — it’s not over,” Fauci said on the “Nursing Talks” radio show in November. “Four hundred deaths a day is not an acceptable level. We want to get it much lower than that.”
Frieden said that 95% of people who die from covid are not up to date on their vaccines and that 75% of people who would benefit from the antiviral drug Paxlovid do not receive it.
“We should celebrate these great tools that we have, but we’re not doing a good job of getting them to people, and that would not only save lives, but reduce the disruption from covid,” he said.
dr. Ashish Jha, coordinator of the White House task force on covid, said that people who are up to date on their vaccines and receive treatment when they have a breakthrough infection have almost no risk of dying from covid at this point in the pandemic. Jha urged older Americans in particular, who are more vulnerable to serious illness, to brace themselves for more protection during the holidays.
“There are still too many older Americans who haven’t updated their immunity and haven’t protected themselves,” Jha said reporters at the White House last week.
Michael Osterholm, a leading epidemiologist, said new variants of Covid will pose the biggest threat to the progress the US has made in 2023.
China relented their strict zero Covid policy to try to suppress outbreaks of the virus in response to widespread social unrest during autumn. Infections now they are rising sharply in the country, raising concerns that Covid now has even more room to mutate.
Over the past year, the virus has continued to mutate into increasingly transmissible versions of the omicron, while immunity from vaccination or previous infection has weakened.
“We want to believe that after three years of operation, any immunity that we would have to acquire through vaccination or previous infection should protect us,” said Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “But with declining immunity and variations — we can’t say that.”
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