By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Aug. 31, 2022
It’s been six months since my last post about the Covid-19 pandemic. As spring got under way, it became clear that the nation had reached an uneasy accommodation with the novel coronavirus.
While the disease infected Americans at a hitherto unseen rate in the early weeks of 2022, thanks to the omicron variant, Covid’s potency declined, also seemingly thanks to that variant. As the spring progressed, more and more U.S. residents stopped wearing masks and socially distancing, and more and more communities and businesses stopped requiring mask wearing and other disease-suppression measures. Although no fewer than 10,881 Americans died of Covid-19 in any given month this year, a majority of us seem to be proceeding as if the disease no longer poses a threat.
There is a measure of truth to this. If you are healthy, if you have or can afford health care, if you are young or youngish, contracting Covid-19 is unlikely to kill you. After all, so far this year, approximately 0.55 percent of reported cases in the U.S. result in death[1]. That’s significantly lower than what we saw in 2020, when 1.73 percent of reported cases ended in death, or 2021, when 1.38 percent of cases were fatal.
On the other hand, if Covid-19 ends your life, or kills someone you love, the statistics about decreased potency may ring a bit hollow.
Nearly two-thirds of the way through 2022, the nation has seen a record number of reported Covid-19 cases, nearly 39.5 million. That’s more than the 20 million documented in 2020 and the nearly 34.7 million reported for all of 2021. Of course, this year has seen an increase of at-home Covid-19 tests, leading to an unknown number of Covid-19 cases being detected but not officially reported. In July, CNN reported that actual infections might be seven to 10 times higher than official counts. That seems to be due to a combination of positive at-home tests that do not result in notifications to health authorities and mild Covid-19 cases that don’t result in symptoms and hence never result in positive tests because the victim feels fine.
The news on fatalities, by comparison, is somewhat mixed. The 62,912 deaths in February and 61,607 deaths in January of this year are the fourth- and fifth-highest totals on record after the winter 2020–21 surge, which saw monthly death totals of 78,019, 95,249 and 71,680 in December 2020 and the first two months of 2021.
The 30,381 fatalities of March 2022 represent the 14th-highest monthly death toll out of what were then 27 months of the pandemic. Since then, however, only one month this year has seen more than 13,000 deaths: August, with 14,433. (That will probably rise to about 14,900 once data for Aug. 31 is incorporated.)
Declining mortality has helped given many Americans the impression that Covid-19 is more nuisance than threat. The reality, as mentioned earlier, is a bit more complicated. The risk of death, while small, is real, and when it occurs, the impact is obviously very significant. Perhaps more importantly, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control recently estimated based on survey data that nearly one in five Americans who reported having Covid-19 suffer from long Covid, defined as symptoms that persist for at least three months after initially coming down with the disease.
Katie Bach, a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution, told National Public Radio this summer that a conservative analysis of data indicates that at least four million Americans are out of work because of long Covid. “That is just a shocking number,” Bach told NPR. “That’s 2.4% of the U.S. working population.”
A number of observers warn that Covid-19’s impact may be changing as time passes. “This could be considered a mass disabling event for our society,” Dr. Lucy Horton, an infectious-disease specialist at UC San Diego Health, told a local reporter this month. “When you have a large number of people that are unable to return to work, this can affect the economy.”
The threat of some form of persistent and/or incurable long Covid is why I continue to spend most of my time at home and wear masks inside public buildings and in crowded outdoor public spaces. I eat at restaurants approximately once a month, usually when I’m either away from home or meeting out-of-town friends or family. When I do eat out, especially indoors, I usually mask up between bites of food and/or drinks.
This isn’t fun, but it is at least somewhat protective of my health and others’. If a lot more Americans were doing this, plus getting vaccines and boosters, Covid-19 might be having much less of an impact on our nation than it is today.
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.
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