“The variant isn’t the only thing that drives mortality,” says Hassig, who wasn’t involved with this paper. The new analysis, though, could put specific numbers to the trend.īut Susan Hassig, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Tulane University in New Orleans, says that this finding also illustrates serious limitations of the analysis. That’s something epidemiologists have understood in other ways New York City experienced the highest per-capita death tolls of the entire pandemic in April 2020, while southern states experienced prolonged outbreaks over 2021. Later, variants killed a disproportionate number of people in the South-158 per 100,000 residents. The Northeast experienced 215 deaths per 100,000 residents before the emergence of variants. The second is the shifting geography of the pandemic. The 2022 death toll has fallen most heavily on older Americans, particularly those in nursing homes. Two years ago, after 100,000 Americans had died in the first spring waves, Walker points out, the New York Times ran a front page headline calling the toll “an incalculable loss.” Now, Walker says, “we see a new variant come around and it’s caused a very similar death toll in the matter of a few months,” even with vaccines widely available. That’s despite the widespread misconception that Omicron is a mild variant. ![]() The first is the toll from Omicron: Researchers estimate this currently dominant variant has killed 110,000 people so far. Walker says that two elements of the findings jump out. “It’s really just that there’s a lot of data covering different locations and time periods.” “There’s not actually a lot of complicated math going on here,” says Walker. “Those transitions are going to take place at different times and at different speeds from state to state,” says Walker.īy lining up known death tolls with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates of variant prevalence in different parts of the country, the researchers could estimate what fraction of people had died from a given COVID strain. When Omicron first arrived in the US this past fall, the upper Midwest was deep into a wave driven by Delta. While most deaths from each variant occur during a wave’s peak, the challenge is in sorting out the moment when one variant sweeps another out of the way. Of the more than a million Americans who had died of COVID-19 as of early May, variants killed 460,000. “A significant fraction, almost half and rising, have died after the ancestral strain” of SARS-CoV-2 was replaced by variants, says Jo Walker, a graduate student at Yale and the report’s lead author. A new report, released in advance of formal publication and independent review, by a team from Yale University’s epidemiology department and the public-interest lobbying group Public Citizen, provides a basic estimate of each variant’s death toll. What’s harder is figuring out the exact toll of each individual variant. Those case spikes are obvious in retrospect. Since the winter of 2020, new coronavirus variants have shaped the COVID-19 pandemic, each of which led to sharp increases in case counts, and eventually, deaths, in the United States. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases-Rocky Mountain Laboratories, NIH SHARE ![]() ![]() Since late in 2020, regular COVID variants have shaped the pandemic.
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