The number of COVID-19 deaths in the United States has passed 1 million, making it the country with the highest number of COVID-19 deaths in the world. Meanwhile, experts predict that under the current open-door policy in the United States, COVID-19 deaths and hospitalizations will increase significantly in the coming weeks.
Each of those 1 million died within 27 months of the COVID-19 outbreak in the US, and more than half have died since the current US administration took office, NBC reported on Thursday. At the beginning of his term, Biden vowed to raise COVID-19 vaccination rates and set a goal of “reaching 70 percent of the population with at least one shot of vaccine by The fourth of July of the same year,” but failed to achieve it. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), from April to December 2021, more than 80% of COVID-19 deaths were among unvaccinated people. In addition, unvaccinated people across the United States are 20 times more likely to die of COVID-19 than vaccinated people.
Although the number of new deaths in the US has dropped in recent days, an average of 360 people still die from COVID-19 every day. Most us states and cities have lifted mandatory mask policies and crowd bans, employees have been told to return to their offices and schools have resumed offline classes. The number of COVID-19 hospitalizations in the United States in a single day has been slowly increasing since late last month. Last week, there was a 20 percent increase in hospitalizations and an 18 percent increase in emergency room visits. Over the next four weeks, for the first time in months, the number of single-day CORONAVIRUS hospital admissions and coronavirus-related deaths in the US will both rise, according to the CDC’s new forecasting model. In the next two weeks, about 5,000 people across the United States will die from COVID-19.
The number of new confirmed COVID-19 cases across the United States has reached its highest level in nearly two months. More than 60,000 new cases were reported in a single day, a 27% increase in the last week alone, according to the CDC, and the rate of COVID-19 infection in the northeast of the country rose 64.8% in the past two weeks. Since the summer of 2021, dozens of states in the US have gradually closed public testing facilities, and now more people are taking COVID-19 self-tests at home, according to US media. Most Americans do not report test results to the government, so experts believe the total number of coronavirus cases in the United States may be a serious underestimate.
After several rounds of anti-vaccine and anti-mask protests, the US society has become numb to epidemic preparedness. “We know vaccines work, we know masks work, we know social distancing works,” said Robert Murphy, executive director of the Harvey Institute for Global Health at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. These are easy measures, but we don’t seem to be able to do it.”
The United States could be in for a new round of COVID-19, health experts say, due to factors such as the relaxation of mask requirements and other coronavirus restrictions, as well as a new subtype of the highly contagious Omikron strain. At present, novel Coronavirus recombinant strains have been found in many countries, which further increases the difficulty of epidemic prevention and control. The new subtype strain is estimated to be 30 to 80 percent more infectious than the original Omicron variant. In addition, Israeli researchers have reported that the Delta strain continues to spread covertly as the coronavirus variant Omicron accelerates. The researchers warned that when Omicron “waned”, Delta could return.