Covid killed more than 27,500 Americans so far this year, but the federal government announced plans to end the Covid-19 Public Health Emergency on May 11, 2023, despite the fact that medical and public health experts say the disease remains a danger.
After 1,115,637 Americans died from Covid, there is a growing sense that vaccines, treatments and other public health measures have helped curb the spread of Covid and keep deaths and hospitalizations down.
As the U.S. enters the fourth year of the pandemic, data shows hundreds of people are still dying as a result of the virus every day, an infectious omicron offshoot tearing across the country and a dismal appetite for updated booster shots.
“It’s a sad commentary that no one in either party seems concerned that 25,000 Americans have died of COVID in the 1st 2 months of 2023,” said Jonathan Reiner, MD, a professor of Medicine and Surgery at George Washington University School of Medicine & Health Sciences. “That’s an annualized rate equal to the total of both drug overdose and gun deaths combined.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, almost 19 percent of the U.S. population has not yet received at least one dose of the Covid-19 vaccine, and only 16 percent have received the primary series plus the updated bivalent booster dose.
Covid-19 put the world on hold three years ago, but since then, doctors have come up with solutions to slow the spread of the virus, including vaccinations, which have emerged to fight evolving forms of the pandemic.
In United States of America, from January 3, 2020 to February 21, 2023, there have been 101,752,396 confirmed cases of COVID-19 with 1,106,783 deaths, reported to the World Health Organization (WHO).
As of February 10, 2023, WHO said a total of 662,514,513 vaccine doses have been administered to the US population.
Globally, there have been nearly 7 million deaths, including more than 150,000 since the beginning of this year, according to WHO.