Photos: Anthony Richard gets a covid-19 test in Providence, R.I., Dec. 7, 2021. (AP Photo/David Goldman) / aprotthttps://www.istockphoto.com/portfolio/aprott?mediatype=photography
Reported U.S. covid cases have collapsed 90 percent from a pandemic record set in January 2022 and hospitalizations have also declined in most places, with new guidelines suggesting that 70 percent of Americans can now stop wearing masks.
Around 84,000 new cases per day on average are now being reported, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University, compared to the pandemic high of 800,000 infections reported on Jan. 15.
There are about 66,000 patients in the U.S. hospitals with covid-19, according to a seven-day average of data from the Department of Health and Human Services, down from the Jan. 20 peak of 159,000 patients.
The covid death toll has fallen from nearly 2,600 per day on Feb. 1 to less than 2,000.
“While we’re not where we all want to be yet, we’re encouraged by the dramatic declines we’re seeing in cases and hospitalizations nationwide,” said Jeff Zients, White House Covid response coordinator.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Friday, Feb. 25 that it has a new strategy to help communities across the U.S. live with the coronavirus and resume normal life. Instead of relying only on the number of cases in a community to determine the need for restrictions such as mask-wearing, the CDC wants counties to consider three things to assess risk of the virus: new covid-related hospital admissions over the previous week; the percentage of hospital beds occupied by covid patients, and new coronavirus cases per 100,000 people over the previous week.
Here are 3 things to know about the collapse in reported covid cases in the U.S.:
Covid is shifting from pandemic to endemic in some parts of the world, with some regions in the Northern Hemisphere hopefully entering a period of relative stability, according to senior executives at U.S. vaccine maker Moderna.
“We do believe that we are transitioning into an endemic phase marked by a period of stability in case counts, hospitalizations and deaths at least in the Northern Hemisphere,” said Paul Burton, Moderna Chief Medical officer.
That would include North America, Europe, most of Asia and much of Africa.
Covid will continue to spread during an endemic phase but at a more static and predictable rate, according to Burton.
As the omicron variant became dominant before Christmas, 2021, covid tests were hard to come by and expensive. The Biden administration made close to 500 million free rapid covid-19 tests available to the public. Most cities in the U.S. have no proper strategy to monitor the results. This means the official reported covid case counts are almost certainly vastly undercounted.
The last instruction in the at-home covid test kit is to report the results. Some test kits advise you to call your healthcare provider while others ask you to use the test maker’s app.
Washington D.C. has established a portal to report covid-positive cases from at-home rapid tests, but the disadvantage is that many residents don’t know about this option and the portal can be hard to track down, even for people predisposed to use it.
Covid will likely follow seasonal patterns like other respiratory diseases such as flu, according to Burton.
He warned that people will continue to get sick and die from covid in the future. He noted that other endemic coronaviruses cause 340,000 hospitalizations and 20,000 deaths annually for people older than 65 years old, citing data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Photos: Anthony Richard gets a covid-19 test in Providence, R.I., Dec. 7, 2021. (AP Photo/David Goldman) / aprotthttps://www.istockphoto.com/portfolio/aprott?mediatype=photography
