But that pattern appears to have changed. Nearly three months since an ultra-contagious set of new Omicron variants launched a springtime resurgence of cases, people are nonetheless dying from Covid-19 at a rate close to the lowest of the pandemic.
"In previous waves, there were still substantial pockets of people who had not been vaccinated or exposed to the virus, and so were at the same risk of dying as people at the beginning of the pandemic," said Dr David Dowdy, a researcher at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health."Those pockets don't exist anymore." That turn in the pandemic has nevertheless left many Americans behind.
"As the time since people got vaccinated becomes longer and longer, the efficacy of the immune response will be lessened," said Dr Abraar Karan, an infectious disease physician at Stanford University."We can be caught off guard later this year." To account for those problems, Dr Dowdy looked at the proportion of reported test results that are positive, a figure known as test positivity. That measure, too, is imperfect, but it reflects the enormous numbers of Americans who recently contracted the virus. Some scientists estimate that the current wave of cases is the second largest of the pandemic.
In the Northeast, where the Omicron subvariants first took hold this spring, deaths climbed as cases surged. In New York, the daily average of Covid-19 deaths rose from eight in April to about 24 in mid-June. Daily deaths in New England increased from five to a peak of 34 over the same period. In a country as large as the United States, every Covid-19 wave is also a collection of staggered regional surges, complicating national trends. In early May, for example, continued declines in Covid-19 deaths in the South and the West from the wintertime Omicron wave might have helped to obscure rising mortality levels in the Northeast.
The country's stagnant booster campaign has also left many older people at a long distance from their last shot and so vulnerable to the effects of waning immunity.
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