August 26, 2021 – According to a new study published today in Nature, around a third of the US population was infected with coronavirus 2 by the end of 2020.
Jeffrey Shaman, PhD, director of the Climate and Health Program at Columbia University, and colleagues simulated the spread of the coronavirus in all 3,142 counties of the United States.
The United States had the highest number of confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths in the world in 2020. More than 19.6 million cases had been reported by the end of the year.
However, the authors point out that “69% of the population remained susceptible to viral infections”.
“We did not turn the corner”
Jill Foster, MD, a pediatric infectious disease doctor at the University of Minnesota Medical School, Minneapolis, says the study adds evidence that: “We haven’t turned the corner on COVID-19 and are nowhere near one Herd immunity – if it exists for SARS. CoV-2. “
Particularly worrying are the numbers presented, how many people are susceptible and could actively infect others: “Much higher than most people imagined and much higher than their comparison, the flu.” There are still more people than we believed “added Foster.” If the pattern continues with the Delta variant infecting a significant proportion of those vaccinated, the number of susceptible people will rise even higher than predicted.
Foster said these numbers are a warning that COVID should be treated as an ongoing threat.
“We need to acknowledge that COVID-19 infection is simmering and breaking out across the country,” she said. “It’s not monolithic and varies by geography and seasons in ways that are difficult to predict, except that at any given point in time, there are likely to be more infections than we identify and more people are susceptible to infection than we calculated.”
Death rate decreased
Some of the data showed good news, Shaman says. The infection death rate fell from 0.77% in April to 0.31% in December. The authors suggest that this could be due to improvements in diagnosis and treatment, patient care, and the reduced severity of the disease.
However, the death rate was still almost four times the estimated death rate from the flu (0.08%) and the 2009 pandemic flu (0.0076%), the authors point out.
Joe K. Gerald, MD, program director of public health policy and management at the University of Arizona at Tucson, says this study helps confirm that COVID-19 is far more deadly than the flu and that the intensity of the response was appropriate .
“We should be ready to invest a lot more in containing COVID-19 than seasonal influenza as it has a much bigger impact,” he said.
The numbers help to emphasize that testing needs to be improved. “We didn’t have enough tests available and they weren’t easily accessible. We flew in the dark for much of the year,” said Gerald.
The number of tests has increased this year, he admitted, but the tests are still lagging behind.
“We just can’t miss so many infections or diagnoses and hope to get control,” he said.
The study also points to the huge differences in infections and deaths by state and even by county that persist. Gerald noted that the numbers make it difficult for some regions to accept broader mandates as the COVID-19 threat looks very different where they are.
“We have to think about regions, how many people are susceptible and what the testing capacity is,” he said. “States and even counties should have some leeway to make important public health decisions as local conditions will differ at different times.”
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