Deaths due to the omicron variant are expected to peak in the coming days, ushering in the end of a wave that will have infected most people in the United States by the spring.
Deaths lag a couple of weeks behind hospitalizations, which have sloped downward in recent days, and recorded deaths are expected to tick up slightly before beginning to decline by next week.
“Trends in death lag behind trends in hospitalization because the sickest people can have very long hospital stays, so deaths may still occur, and because death reports take time to process and get rolled up into national databases. So deaths that have occurred may not show up for a while,” said Dr. Thomas Giordano, an infectious disease expert at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas.
SEVEN IN 10 SAY COVID-19 SHOULD BE ACCEPTED AS NEW NORMAL: POLL
Over 2,550 deaths were recorded on average every day over the past week, the highest seven-day average seen yet during the omicron wave. While high, the death rate caused by omicron pales in comparison to the deaths that occurred during the winter 2020-21 surge, when average daily deaths per week exceeded 3,300, at one point in January. The omicron variant is more infectious than the delta variant, though it appears less likely to cause severe disease.
A precipitous drop in new infections and recent declines in hospitalizations have signaled that omicron is retreating. The variant’s onslaught has been acute. More people have been hospitalized with the omicron variant than ever before during the nearly two-year pandemic. Around 140,000 people are being treated for COVID-19 in U.S. hospitals, an 11% decline from two weeks ago, though still higher than in any previous surge.
“It seems we have already hit the peak for cases and the peak for hospital admissions, and most likely, we will reach the peak of deaths in the next few days,” said Dr. Anass Bouchnita, a data scientist at the University of Texas at Austin who has tracked omicron’s spread as part of the university’s COVID-19 modeling consortium.
Omicron will continue to circulate into the spring. Bouchnita and fellow data scientists have predicted that “by April 1, 2022, under around 40% to 70% of the population will have been infected with omicron.” At that point, a majority of U.S. residents will have accrued immunity conferred through vaccination or exposure and recovery from the virus, or a combination of the two, that would be expected to brunt the effects of the next variant that arises.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
While hospitalizations nationwide have shown declines, several states have reported persistent increases in hospital admissions over the past two weeks. For instance, hospitalizations in Alaska have climbed 63% in that time period, according to New York Times data. In Wyoming, hospitalizations have increased 56%, and in Idaho, that rate has climbed 43%. Several Southern states, such as Alabama, South Carolina, and Tennessee, have reported increases in hospitalizations of 30%, 15%, and 13% over the past 14 days, respectively.
“If we take a look at the trends in different states, I think most of them have already exceeded the peak in terms of cases. However, they are still at different levels of decrease in cases,” Bouchnita said. “But generally speaking, I think most of the states, if not all of them, have exceeded the peak by now.”
