US coronavirus: A year after the pandemic was declared, US Covid-19 numbers are
One vaccine expert is concerned that as case numbers fall and days get warmer and longer, many people will forgo getting a shot.
“I think we are going to get fooled.” Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said. “I think what’s going to happen is you’re going to see that as we enter the summer months, numbers are going to go down, people will think great, we’re good.”
If the United States doesn’t reach 80% of the population having immunity via inoculations because people lost interest in being vaccinated, another surge is possible, he said.
But the rise in cases late this year could be less significant if more than 260 million get their shots.
“I think when next winter comes, because this virus isn’t going away, (if we get to 80% vaccinated) we’ll see a bump instead of a surge,” Offit said at a virtual event hosted by the Aspen Institute, an educational and policy studies organization, “and that’d be the test of how well we’ve done with getting this in hand.”
Biden said he was directing states to open coronavirus vaccine eligibility to all adults (those older than 18) by May 1.
Preliminary CDC data shows 2020 deadliest year for US
Largely because of the pandemic, 2020 appears to have been the deadliest year in the recorded history of the United States — at least since 1900, according to early data from the CDC.
The health agency said in an email that its analysis suggests 2020 was the deadliest year in recorded history in terms of total number of deaths, and there was a 15% increase in the US death rate last year because of the pandemic.
“We are working on a future report, but the underlying data on which the report is based are already available from our website,” a CDC spokesperson wrote in the email.
For now, provisional data online shows that last year, 3,362,151 people died from all causes in the United States. Among those deaths, 378,292 involved Covid-19, according to the CDC data. With the US population being around 330 million people, about 3.3 million deaths represents 1% of the nation’s total population.
Total deaths last year were 18% higher than expected relative to recent years, according to the provisional data on the CDC’s website.
Overall, “2020 will have been the deadliest by far as long as we’ve kept records and almost certainly as long as the US has existed,” Bob Anderson, chief mortality statistician for the CDC, told CNN on Thursday. But, he added, you have to account for population growth and also aging of the population.
The longest year
“After a year of this fight, we are tired, we are lonely, we are impatient,” CDC Director Dr. Rochelle…
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