WASHINGTON — In the first month of 2022, COVID-19 killed more Americans than the flu has in three years, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data shows.
From Jan. 1-30, approximately 55,000 Americans died due to COVID-19, bringing the seven-day death average to the highest point it’s been since last winter, before vaccines were widely available, according to CDC data.
Between 2019 and Jan. 22 of this year, influenza claimed over 24,000 lives, CDC figures show. From 2019 to 2020, 20,000 died from the flu, followed by sharp declines in 2020-2021, and 2021 to the present, which totaled approximately 4,000 fatalities.
The number of flu deaths for the 2020-2021 period was not available on the CDC website, but the organization shared the figure — 748 — with the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Although the coronavirus has sometimes been compared to the flu — often in an attempt to downplay its severity — data continually proves COVID-19 is deadlier.
The recent numbers from the CDC reinforce that fact, but also suggest that with the newer, “milder” omicron variant, COVID-19 remains a greater threat to public health than the flu.
While omicron is considered more mild than delta on an individual basis — as it’s less likely to kill or hospitalize those it infects, especially if vaccinated — it makes up for it with transmissibility, the Associated Press reported. The more people infected, the more chances the virus has to kill.
“Omicron will push us over a million deaths,” Andrew Noymer, a public health professor at the University of California, Irvine, told the outlet. “That will cause a lot of soul searching. There will be a lot of discussion about what we could have done differently, how many of the deaths were preventable.”
Fatalities rose as the highly infectious omicron variant moved through the nation, establishing itself as the dominant variant in a matter of weeks.
After burning through a given population, omicron infections seem to hit a peak, followed by a sharp decline, McClatchy News reported. Experts have suggested omicron could be a “turning point” in the pandemic, a shift to something more manageable.
In the U.S. and in countries across the world — such as Spain and Japan — some leaders are watching omicron with hope, believing that the variant could be treated like the flu, outlets reported. And if it is like the flu, then it may be time to return to life as it was before coronavirus swept the globe — or at least, it’s a sign that restrictions can be eased.
But it’s too early to declare victory over COVID-19, experts say.
Cases are falling in the U.S. “almost as swiftly as they came up,” but deaths remain high, CDC director Rochelle Walensky told Katie Couric in an interview, adding that in the case of omicron, “Milder does not mean mild.”
“We all want to be in a place where we are not living in a crisis situation,” Walensky said. “We are not there yet.”
It’s also unlikely omicron will remain the dominant COVID-19 variant forever, Maria Van Kerkhove, an epidemiologist with the World Health Organization, told the BBC.
“This virus is still evolving, it’s still changing,” she said. “It will not end with this latest wave with omicron, and it will not be the last variant you hear us speaking about, unfortunately.”
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