Despite rampant fear spreading in the US media about new sub-variants of Covid, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Infection cast doubt on any cause for alarm.
CDC statistics reveal that only 1% of all weekly deaths in the United States are attributed to Covid-19. For the week ending August 19, the CDC’s Covid Dashboard reports 324 Covid-related fatalities, making up just 1.7% of all deaths during that period.
While the Covid death toll for the week ending August 19 reflects a smaller increase from the previous week, it is substantially lower than at the peak of the pandemic, when the CDC cited Covid as the cause of almost one in three deaths.
The data highlights that states such as Washington, Florida, Tennessee, North Carolina, Maryland and New York are experiencing higher rates of Covid-induced deaths. Maryland and Florida lead with 3.4 percent, while Washington, Tennessee, North Carolina and New York are all around 2 percent. Instead, more than 24 states reported between one and nine Covid-related deaths in the week ending August 19.
Additional data show that the death rate is marginally higher among women than among men and is highest among people aged 75 and older.
These latest data may offer some comfort at a time when anxieties are rising across the country over the spread of new highly transmissible variants of Covid, leading to increased infections and hospitalizations, as well as the reintroduction of certain Covid mandates.
Recently detected variants such as EG.5 (Eris) and BA.8.26 (Pirola) have emerged in several countries, including the United States. These variants have undergone extensive mutations, making them potentially more adept at evading the vaccine and natural immunity, and contributing to increased infections.
Despite the emergence of these variants, infections in the US have doubled and hospital admissions have increased for the fifth week in a row, but remain near historic lows. Importantly, Covid-related deaths have not increased.
Concerns last week about a resurgence of Covid led Hollywood studio Lionsgate to enforce mask mandates at its offices in Santa Monica, California. Later, this decision was overturned within days. Similarly, Rutgers University in New Jersey and Morris Brown College in Georgia said face coverings will be mandatory for faculty and students.
Medical facilities such as Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Santa Rosa, California, and Upstate Community Hospital in Syracuse, New York, have reinstated mask requirements for healthcare workers, patients and visitors.
In Kentucky, the Lee County School District closed classes less than two weeks after reopening after nearly 20 percent of its student body fell ill with a “triple epidemic” of illnesses including Covid, strep and flu
President Biden indicated Friday that his administration will “likely” recommend another Covid booster vaccine soon. He also signed a proposal asking Congress for additional funds to modify Covid vaccines to better counter new variants. However, public interest in booster shots remains lukewarm, with only 18% of eligible Americans having received any form of booster.
In a February 2023 Natural Medicine article, researchers at the Queen’s Institute for Medical Research in Edinburgh discovered the influence of comorbidities and multimorbidities on severe disease and death in patients with Covid-19.
“Even when a comorbidity causally influences outcomes, the underlying mechanisms may not be specific to COVID-19,” the researchers explain. “Comorbidities can predispose a person to hospitalization, and even admission to the intensive care unit (ICU), as a result of almost any acute illness, a nonspecific concept that is widely understood among physicians. , but often impossible to quantify in biological terms.”
“Specific examples include lung conditions, such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and pulmonary fibrosis…” the researchers continued, adding: “These measurable reductions in the functional capacity of specific organs increase the proportional impact of a new insult; there is less function to lose before the organ fails to meet the minimum requirements for survival. Frailty, malnutrition, and chronic disease without organ dysfunction can affect an individual’s ability to tolerate even relatively minor physiological stress, resulting in an increased likelihood of hospitalization and/or the need for organ support.”
The researchers then provide a critical view of the global context of comorbidities and multimorbidities when it comes to deaths from Covid-19.
“Most research related to the impact of long-term conditions on COVID-19 has focused on individual comorbidities. However, an estimated one-third of adults worldwide have two or more long-term conditions86, increasing to more than two-thirds in those aged 65 and over87”, the authors point out. “In a large study of people hospitalized with COVID-19 in the UK, crude mortality in patients with multimorbidity was more than double that in those without multimorbidity (37.2% vs. 17.3%), even after to adjust for demographic factors88”.
As the Mayo Clinic noted, about 81% of Covid-related deaths in the United States have occurred in people 65 and older, adding that “the risks are even greater for older people when they have other health problems.”
Even taking into account the difficulty in assessing cause of death in a predominantly elderly population with comorbidities, the Covid-19 pandemic nevertheless had a 99.7% survival rate in the United States.
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