Coronavirus is a rapidly-evolving virus that has sparked summer in the United States with many infections and relatively few deaths, compared to previous incarnations.
COVID-19 continues to kill hundreds of Americans every day, but it isn't nearly as deadly as last winter and fall.
Ali Mokdad, an associate professor of health metrics sciences at University of Washington in Seattle, said that "it's going to be good summer and it deserves this break."
COVID-19 is now a nuisance that has many Americans protected from serious illness and infection.
"It feels cautiously positive right now," Dr. Dan Kaul, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Michigan Medical Center (Ann Arbor), said. "We don't have any COVID-19 patients in the ICU for the first time since it began," Dr. Dan Kaul said.
The average daily death rate from COVID-19 is currently hovering at 360 as the nation celebrates July Fourth. It was 228 in July last year during a similar summer lull. This is the lowest level of daily death in the United States since March 2020 when the virus began to spread.
However, there were far fewer cases reported at this time last years -- less than 20,000 per day. It's now about 109,000, and this is likely because home tests aren’t regularly reported.
It's easy to get confused today, in the third anniversary of the pandemic. Repeat infections are increasing in likelihood, and a large share of infected people will experience the long-term effects of COVID-19.
Fortunately, many people are less at risk of dying.
"That's because everyone's immune system is now at a point where they've seen the virus or the vaccine twice or three times," Dr. David Dowdy of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said. He's an infectious disease epidemiologist. "The body will learn over time not to react too strongly when it encounters this virus."
Dowdy stated, "What we are seeing is that people get less and less sick on average."
According to an influential model, 8-10% of Americans have been infected at some point.
According to Mara Aspinall, an Arizona State University researcher in the health industry, the death rate for COVID-19 was a moving target. However, it has recently fallen within the range of an average flu season.
Aspinall stated that coronavirus was initially believed to be no more dangerous than the flu. People didn't have immunity back then. The treatments were experimental. Vaccines didn't exist.
Aspinall stated that the flu season is now over and the death rate has dropped to a range comparable to a normal flu season. The flu death rate has been around 5% to 13% for those who have been hospitalized over the past decade.
There are big differences between flu and COVID-19. Health experts continue to be amazed at the behavior of coronaviruses, and it is still not clear if it will settle into a flu-like seasonal pattern.
The arrival of omicron and the delta surge, which claimed 2,600 lives per day in its peak period last February, were the results of the vaccinations becoming widely available in the U.S.
Experts believe a new variant could emerge that can escape the population's immunity. The rapid-spreading subtypes of omicron BA.4 or BA.5 could also be contributing to a decrease in death rates.
"We thought that we understood it," Dr. Peter Hotez, an infectious diseases specialist at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, said.
He said it would be prudent to assume that a new version will arrive and hit the country later in the summer.
Hotez stated, "And then another late-fall-winter wave."
The deaths in the United States could increase over the coming weeks. However, the U.S. overall is expected to see a slight decline in deaths, according to Nicholas Reich, who in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, aggregates coronavirus forecasts for the COVID-19 Weather Forecast Hub.
"We have seen COVID hospitalizations rise to approximately 5,000 new admissions per day, up from just over 1000 in April. However, COVID deaths have not increased significantly over that same period," Reich, a professor of biostatistics from University of Massachusetts Amherst said.
The risk of COVID-19 death in unvaccinated individuals is six times greater than that of people who have had at least one primary series of shots. This was based on data available as of April.
Dowdy suggested that this summer you should be aware of your vulnerability and the vulnerability of others, particularly in large groups, as the virus is rapidly spreading.
He said, "There are still individuals who are very much at danger."
