After more than three years, more than 6 million hospitalizations and 1.1 million US deaths, the Biden administration has officially ended the federal Covid-19 public health emergency as of May 11, 2023.
In a fact sheet Summarizing the decision, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services stated that since January 2021, hospitalizations and deaths related to Covid-19 have declined by 91 percent and 95 percent, respectively.
With the World Health Organization also declaring earlier this month that Covid-19 is now just a global health threat, rather than an “emergency of international concern”, May 2023 marks a turning point in the pandemic.
However, some experts fear that such statements could be misleading. “If the government is sending the message that Covid-19 is mostly over, I don’t think that’s helpful,” said Harvard University epidemiologist William Hanage. “I would say the ongoing costs of Covid should be lower than we tolerate. People are still dying and the frustrating thing is that many of these deaths are preventable.”
Covid-19 is still killing people
While the significant spikes in hospitalizations and deaths that characterized so much of 2020 and 2021 are long gone, Covid-19 is still claiming an ongoing death toll due to the effectiveness of the global vaccine rollout.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than 1,000 Americans continue to die every week from causes related to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. This unbroken streak of fatalities can add up to a surprisingly large number over the course of weeks and months. Between December 28 and May 3, approximately 42,924 Americans died of Covid-19, according to CDC figures.
“It’s a slow burn, but it’s a steady burn,” said Denis Nash, an epidemiologist at the City University of New York. “If you start looking at this data over time, it’s really scary and insidious how many deaths are still happening. I think when people see it that way they really start to realize that this isn’t over as we hear a lot of our elected leaders, politicians and other talking heads talk about it.
Who is the most vulnerable?
The elderly and those with underlying health conditions remain the most vulnerable to the virus. In particular, the 7 million Americans who are immunocompromised remain at risk from the virus because major monoclonal antibody treatments are now ineffective against the newer variants.
Cutbacks in data collection have made it difficult for scientists to understand which segments of the population are hospitalized and dying from Covid-19. The CDC has announced it is now halting some of its Covid data tracking efforts, including tracking and reporting new infections.
“You have some people who’ve gotten vaccines and so doctors assume they’re not vulnerable anymore, but their immunity isn’t as strong because of their age or health issues, and these are the people who slip through the cracks,” says Nash .
According to William Schaffner, a professor of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn., the majority of people who are hospitalized now are typically vaccinated but fall into certain high-risk groups. “These are people who are elderly, frail, or younger patients with underlying illnesses such as heart or lung disease or diabetes,” he says.
Continuous variants
New variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus continue to emerge and become dominant in different parts of the world, often subtly changing the symptomatology of Covid.
For example, the latest Omicron subvariant, XBB.1.16, nicknamed Arcturus, contains an additional mutation in the spike protein that makes it more contagious than Omicron. It was first discovered in India and was discovered in 30 countries by early May.