Here comes the next COVID wave
By 
Two weeks after the United Kingdom dropped its last remaining Covid-19 mitigation measure — a requirement that people who test positive for the virus isolate for five days — the country is seeing cases and hospitalizations climb once again.Covid-19 cases were up 48% in the UK last week compared with the week before. Hospitalizations were up 17% over the same period.The country’s daily case rate — about 55,000 a day — is still less than a third of the Omicron peak, but cases are rising as fast as they were falling just two weeks earlier, when the country removed pandemic-related restrictions.
Daily cases are also rising in more than half of the countries in the European Union. They’ve jumped 48% in the Netherlands and 20% in Germany over the past week, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. But daily cases in Germany had yet to drop below pre-Omicron levels, and the Netherlands hadn’t seen cases fall as much as they did in the UK.
The situation in Europe has the attention of public health officials for two reasons: First, the UK offers a preview of what may play out in the United States, and second, something unusual seems to be happening. In previous waves, increases in Covid hospitalizations lagged behind jumps in cases by about 10 days to two weeks. Now, in the UK, cases and hospitalizations seem to be rising in tandem, something that has experts stumped.
“So we’re obviously keenly interested in what’s going on with that,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNN.
Fauci said he’s spoken with his UK counterparts, and they have pegged the rise to a combination three factors. In order of contribution, Fauci said, these are:
- The BA.2 variant, which is more transmissible than the original Omicron
- The opening of society, with people mingling more indoors without masks
- Waning immunity from vaccination or prior infection
In a technical briefing Friday, the UK Health Security Agency said BA.2 had an 80% higher relative growth rate than the original Omicron strain, though it does not seem more likely to lead to hospitalization.
Given that BA.2 doesn’t seem to be causing more severe disease — at least not in the highly vaccinated British population — it’s not clear why hospitalizations are ticking up.
“The issue with hospitalization is a little bit more puzzling, because although the hospitalizations are going up, it is very clear their use of ICU beds has not increased,” Fauci said. “So are the numbers of hospitalizations a real reflection of Covid cases, or is there a difficulty deciphering between people coming into the hospital with Covid or because of Covid?”
The US, like the UK, has lifted most mitigation measures as Covid-19 infections have fallen.
The seven-day moving average of daily deaths in the USA is still at 1,107, despite the fact that the original Omicron wave peaked two months ago, and official case counts are 95% lower now than they were then. Daily deaths will probably fall into the mid to high three figures over the next couple of weeks, but seem likely to begin to climb again when what’s happening in Europe hits here, which is probably already beginning to happen.
Fun with statistics:
Total Deaths in USA 2018-2019:
5,694,043
Estimated Total Deaths in the USA in 2020-2021 if not for COVID:
Assume a .91% annual increase in total deaths. This was the average annual increase in the 20 years prior to the pandemic. Deaths increase because of a larger population that has been getting older on average. These two factors are somewhat offset by the age-adjusted mortality rate, that almost always falls subject to certain notable exceptions, such as a surfeit of Sacklers or a global pandemic.
2020: 2,880,532 estimated total deaths if not for COVID
2021: 2,906,457 estimated total deaths f not for COVID
Total: 5,786,939. estimated total deaths in 2020-2021 if not for COVID
Total actual deaths 2020-2021, as of March 16, 2022 CDC statistics (The 2021 number may climb by a few thousand before the figure is officially finalized next month.):
6,840,937
This indicates 1,053,998 excess deaths in 2020-2021, alone, not counting what has happened in the first two and a half months of 2022.
The CDC estimates 1,094,155 excess deaths in the USA between 2/2020 through 3/14/2022.
This is a conservative estimate, because it averages six years of death rates, and death rates will be lower at the end of just about any typical six year period than the average death rate over that period, absent special circumstances (see above).
The CDC attributes 875,861 of these deaths to COVID and 218,474 to other causes.
Note that the CDC currently considers 90.8% of the of the official total of 964,831 COVID deaths to be excess deaths, in the sense that the former percentage is made up of people who would be alive today if not for COVID. Official COVID death counts are certainly too low, and therefore actually account for some significant portion of those 218,474 “other” deaths.
There have been 140,215 COVID deaths in 2022 through March 15 per the CDC, almost all of which are currently excess deaths, statistically.
Thus a less conservative and probably more realistic estimate of the excess deaths in the USA during the COVID epidemic so far — excess deaths began to appear statistically exactly two years ago this coming week — is around 1.2 to 1.25 million.
The good news is that the vaccines remain remarkably effective against the virus, especially in people who have received a booster shot. The bad news is that there are still many tens of millions of adults in the USA who remain completely unvaccinated, let alone boosted.