By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Feb. 28, 2022
The United States has reached a strange pandemic crossroads.
On the one hand, new Covid-19 diagnoses have fallen by more than 90 percent from Jan. 14. Then, nearly 807,000 cases were reported daily. On Sunday, Feb. 27, that had dropped to roughly 65,285[1]. As the crush of cases has eased, hospitalizations have fallen dramatically. As of Feb. 19, 4.9 Americans per 100,000 residents were hospitalized with Covid-19, down from the all-time high of 30.6 per 100,000 for the week ending Jan. 15. The Feb. 19 hospitalization level is the lowest since late July.
On the other hand, the novel coronavirus continues to kill Americans at an alarming pace. Through the 27th, February saw 2,257 daily deaths, the third straight month that category has increased since November, when it stood at 1,181. Since the start of the year, the nation is averaging 2,112 daily deaths, far higher than what we saw in either 2020 (1,003) or 2021 (1,310).
February’s case-fatality rate stands at 1.59 percent, far higher than the 0.7 percent rate of December 2021 and the 0.3 percent that we had in January of this year. February’s figure is above the pandemic-long rate of 1.2 percent but is essentially the median. That 1.59 percent is tied with the mark of February 2020, as Covid-19 was just arriving in North America, for the 12th-highest figure out of the 26 pandemic months.
This leads to a sort of good news/bad news situation. The U.S. case-fatality rate over the first two months of 2022 is 0.51 percent, essentially half of what we saw through the end of 2021. That’s good! But because of omicron’s rapid spread, we’re on track for nearly 152 million new Covid-19 diagnoses, or nearly twice as many cases as have been recorded in the nation since the beginning of the pandemic in January 2020. If the nation were to maintain its current pace, we would see a record 771,201 fatalities, significantly higher than last year’s death toll of 478,286. That’s very very bad.
I don’t expect the current pace to hold, however. If past performance is a reliable guide to the future, both disease spread and death will likely drop as we head into the warmer months. Having said that, if omicron is replaced by something that spreads faster and is more lethal, all bets are off.
Last week, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control relaxed its masking recommendations for vaccinated people. More and more states, counties, cities and school districts are dropping masking requirements as well, a trend that began before the CDC released its new guidelines.
We’ve reached this stage in part because, although only 64.9 percent of all Americans are fully vaccinated, and only 43.7 percent of that fully vaccinated group has received booster shots, the vaccines have been incredibly effective. CDC data show that unvaccinated adults are hospitalized with Covid-19 at an age-adjusted rate of 145.1 people per 100,000 residents, roughly seven times the 21.3 per 100,000 rate at which fully vaccinated people are hospitalized.
What’s more, the expectation is that fully vaccinated individuals will likely experience protection for many months.
There’s other good news, such as the continued rollout of antiviral medicine that has shown to be effective at preventing severe cases and death. The development of new vaccines that may be better able to counter future Covid-19 variants is another positive sign. So is the ongoing effort to administer vaccines in low-wealth nations, where immunization rates are far lower than in wealthy parts of North America, Europe and Asia.
Is the pandemic largely over for fully vaccinated and boosted people? I personally am not ready to stop masking indoors in public situations, but the decision to end masking mandates may make some sense from a public-policy perspective.
I’m going to continue to watch case and death rates. I don’t think it will be possible to declare victory over the coronavirus definitively until we make it through another winter without the kind of dramatic surge that we’ve seen following the 2020 and 2021 holiday seasons. However, if the numbers keep dropping, then maybe — fingers crossed — it will be possible to hope that the worst is truly behind us.
Footnotes
1. 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 always use rolling-week averages when providing the case or death figures for a specific day to account for reporting gaps on weekends and holidays. ↩
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