Coronavirus deaths in the United States exceeded 450,000 on Thursday, and daily deaths remain stubbornly high at more than 3,000 a day, despite declining infections and the arrival of multiple vaccines.
Infectious disease specialists expect deaths to start falling soon, after new cases peaked around the beginning of the year. New COVID-19 deaths could already decrease next week, the new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.
But there is also the risk that improved trends in infections and hospitalizations could be offset by people relaxing and getting together – also this Sunday to watch football, she added.
“I’m very worried about Super Bowl Sunday, honestly,” said Dr. Rochelle Walensky said in an interview with The Associated Press on Thursday.
Walensky said one of the reasons why cases and hospitalizations are not increasing as dramatically as weeks ago is because the effect of holiday gatherings has faded.
The effect on deaths is delayed. The daily toll in the last two weeks alone is 50,000 new deaths.
“We’re still in a bad place,” she said.
The country reported 3912 COVID-19 deaths on Wednesday, down from the pandemic high of 4,466 deaths on January 12.
The biggest cause of the U.S. death toll in the past month was California, which has averaged more than 500 deaths a day in recent weeks.
Dora Padilla was one of thousands of Californians killed in the past month.
The 86-year-old daughter of Mexican immigrants served as a curator for schools in the Alhambra Unified School District in Southern California for two decades after helping as a parent volunteer and tape booster for her own children. She was at that time one of the few Latinos who held the elected office.
She tested positive in December at the factory where she lived, and then got a fever and saw her oxygen level drop. Daughter Lisa Jones said the hospital would call an ambulance but decided to treat her there amid a surge in infections that filled local hospitals with virus patients.
“They were almost ready to call an ambulance, but they realized there was no place for her to go. “She’s going to end up in a corridor somewhere,” Jones said.
Padilla was stable for days and seemed to be improving, but suddenly became ill again before she died.
“I’m just numb yet,” her daughter said.
The California experience reflects many of the inequalities that have been uncovered since the pandemic began nearly a year ago, and colored people in particular are particularly affected.
Latinos, for example, make up 46% of the total death toll in California, even though they make up 39% of the state’s population. The situation has worsened in recent months. In November, the daily death toll in Latino was 3.5 per 100,000 inhabitants, but last week the percentage rose to 40 deaths per 100,000.
Alabama is another hot spot. The seven-day average mortality rate there has risen over the past two weeks, from 74 to 147 deaths per day. Kentucky, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Tennessee also experienced an increase in deaths.
The heaviest demographic groups are still the oldest and most fragile, said dr. Thomas Holland of Duke University said.
When the coronavirus first swept through the country, it was concentrated in nursing homes, prisons and other care facilities. It later spread wider.
“But deaths are still concentrated among elderly patients and patients” with other health problems, Holland said. “Although the pandemic has spread more widely in the population, the demographics of those who die from COVID have not really changed.
In Florida, for example, 83 percent of the deaths attributed to the virus were in people 65 and older.
It was still not enough to inspire some people to wear masks. A recent viral video from Oakes Farms Seed to Table, a local grocery store in Naples, Florida, shows maskless customers and employees, chatting and laughing, without any social distance.
Alfie Oakes, the owner of the store, told the NBC program “Today” that he knows that masks do not work, and he does not believe that the coronavirus has killed hundreds of thousands of people in the United States.
‘It’s total pig water,’ Oakes said, adding: ‘Why are we not closing the world because of the heart attacks? Why do our cities not close due to heart attacks? ”
He did not return a call from the AP on Thursday.
Public health experts are keeping a close eye on Florida this week as the Super Bowl is played in Tampa. City leaders and the NFL are trying to ensure social exclusion by limiting the attendance of a third of the stadium’s capacity – 22,000 people. Yet there are parties, events at pubs and clubs and other activities that draw people together.
While most people who become infected recover, others will face a much longer path. It can take a week or two to get sick to end up in the hospital. Those who are seriously ill can then end up in an ICU for many weeks and some will die.
“The patients who are not doing well are regularly engaged in these long and very stormy courses, and the patients who die are usually weeks in their hospital stay,” Holland said.
Treatments evolved over time for COVID, but there were no “game-changing miracle treatments” consistent with vaccine development, Holland said.
“We have things on the edge that are useful,” Holland said.
Among the use of steroids for patients in need of oxygen, different ventilator strategies and the prevention and management of blood clots. There is also the use of monoclonal antibodies early in their disease for outpatients who do not need to use oxygen but who are at greater risk for complications.
In addition, changes in testing helped.
“Obviously, if people know they are infected, they will be more likely to do the things they need to do, such as stay home and be quarantined or isolated,” he said.
Looking ahead, the biggest concern is how the virus changes, to new strains that may be more contagious and better able to evade antibody products, or to make vaccines less effective.
“We’ve always been in a race,” Holland said. “But it’s much clearer now that we’re quick enough to vaccinate people to slow down the transmission, so that the virus has less opportunity to change and change and create these stress problems for us.”
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Associated Press writers Mike Stobbe in New York City and Tamara Lush in St. Louis. Petersburg, Florida, contributed to this report.