By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Dec. 31, 2021
Well, it’s safe to say that 2021 did not turn out how I’d hoped it would. I’m sure hundreds of millions of people around the world feel the same way.
Covid-19 vaccines arrived with nigh-miraculous speed at the tail end of 2020 and, despite major early problems with distribution, immunization rates rose past 50 percent in wealthy nations in a matter of months. Unfortunately, the pandemic remains a serious public health threat. That’s partly because wealthy nations haven’t done enough to help less well-off countries acquire and administer vaccines.
It’s also partly because a significant segment of the population simply refuses to defer to scientific, medical or health authorities, whether they’re being asked to wear masks in public, cut down on unnecessary socializing and other in-person activities, or get vaccinated. To no small extent, this is due to the nefarious influence of Fox News and other right-wing media outlets. A recent analysis found that the 10 percent of American counties that had the highest proportion of Trump votes in the 2020 presidential election had death rates that were six times higher than those of the 10 percent of U.S. counties that had the highest proportion of Biden votes.
The result has been a nightmare. Average daily new deaths in the U.S. dropped to 273 in July, the lowest point since the country’s first official Covid-19 fatality was recorded in March 2020. But the national death rate has more than quadrupled since then. After rising to 890 in August, average daily deaths shot past 1,100 and stayed there throughout the fall and into December.
It’s unclear how the rapidly spreading omicron variant will affect death rates. We do know that this version of the novel coronavirus is increasing the strain on many U.S. hospitals, where work forces have been affected by burnout after nearly two full years of dealing with the pandemic. “Care in our hospitals is safe, but our ability to provide it is threatened,” top doctors at a hospital chain in upstate New York wrote in an open letter to their community this week. “At any time, you or a loved one might need our support. Heart attacks. Car accidents. Cancer. Appendicitis. Stroke. Now, an ominous question looms: Will you be able to get care from your local community hospital without delay? Today, that is uncertain.”
While there are signs that omicron may cause a milder form of illness than delta and previous variants, the evidence on this is mixed. And omicron’s speedy spread threatens to overwhelm hospitals even if that proves to be the case.
The U.S. set an all-time record for new Covid-19 diagnoses on Monday, Dec. 27, with 543,415. Prior to Dec. 20, the top two days for newly reported cases were Sept. 7, with 301,138, and Jan. 8, with 300,777.
The rolling-week daily average, which levels out the effect of weekends and holidays on case reporting, is just as discouraging. The last two days for which data were available each set records, with 266,430 new daily cases over the past seven days on Tuesday, Dec. 28, and an average of 301,480 new daily diagnoses over the week ending on Wednesday the 29th.
(All case and death figures in this post are taken from my analysis of New York Times data, which the newspaper makes available here.)
I’m not sure where that leaves us going into 2022. Perhaps Covid-19 will peter out and become a significantly diminished threat, akin to the flu, which tends to kill around 36,000 Americans a year. Or perhaps we’ll continue to suffer 1,300 daily coronavirus deaths, as we have in 2021.
It’s worth looking at the death tolls in detail. The nation saw 1,309 average daily deaths this year, as compared to 1,003 in 2020. That works out to more than 475,000 deaths in the pandemic’s second calendar year vs. 346,050 in 2020.
Is that acceptable? The novel coronavirus was the third-leading cause of death in the United States in 2020. Given that many of those deaths were preventable, and have been enabled by conservative politicians who have largely maintained their public support, our collective decision seems to be that this level of mortality is indeed tolerable.
Many of the deaths in 2021 and going forward will occur among unvaccinated individuals, the vast majority of whom appear to have made a conscious decision to avoid a potentially life-saving preventive medicine. Is that acceptable? If not, is there anything that can be done about it?
The temptation at this point, even among those who have spent months scrupulously attempting to avoid contracting or spreading the virus, is to shrug and say, “Whatever will be will be; let it happen.” Unfortunately, this overlooks the risk that increased viral spread has the potential to lead to even nastier variants.
Perhaps that’s what we’ll see in 2023: A nation in which many of us yawn indifferently and many others vehemently refuse vaccination, with deaths rising all the while.
I don’t know what will happen. But it sure seems like we haven’t had many positive developments over the first two years of the pandemic. People at every level made bad assessments about the dangers posed by Covid-19, and consequently made bad decisions that resulted in mass infection and death.
Reasonable people don’t drive through heavy traffic by closing their eyes and hoping to emerge unscathed on the other side. But it seems like, by and large, that’s how we as a society have attempted to deal with the pandemic.
What else is there to say? Only this: If you’re planning to celebrate New Year’s Eve tonight with people with whom you do not live, try to be safe. Remain outdoors, keep the proceedings short, avoid crowds, maintain a distance from people and above all else wear a tight-fitting mask over your nose and mouth.
MEMwrites 
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