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The deadly wave of the Delta coronavirus variant across the United States is leveling off, another sign that the country’s most recent wave has peaked.
The seven-day average of daily reports of new Covid-19 deaths has hovered around 2,000 for more than a week, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. This follows a roughly two-month rise in the death toll as Delta particularly aggressively swept the southern United States, hammering states like Florida, Louisiana and Arkansas. Public health officials and researchers say serious illness and death have largely affected unvaccinated populations.
The push pushed north, hitting states from Idaho and Montana to Maine. But a cooling in places like Florida has helped slow national numbers, epidemiologists say. Cases began to stabilize nationwide in early September, leading to declines, and trends in deaths tend to follow the trends of multi-week cases.
Public health researchers have attributed the easing of the delta’s surge to a series of factors. Spikes in hospitalizations and deaths may have encouraged some people to take more precautions, and the rapid spread of Delta may have increased the number of people who now have immune protection against infections and contributed to slow the spread of the virus, researchers say.
Some states like Texas and Florida have also turned increasingly to monoclonal antibodies to treat those infected, as treatments can help patients who receive them early enough to potentially avoid hospitalization.
The United States recorded nearly 82,000 additional deaths from Covid-19 in August and September, until Wednesday, more than four times the number of known deaths from Covid-19 in the previous two months, according to data from Johns Hopkins.
Thousands of white flags on the National Mall in Washington, DC represent Americans who have died from Covid-19.
Photo:
joshua roberts / Reuters
“Since the vast majority of serious illnesses and deaths occur in the unvaccinated, that this is truly an unvaccinated pandemic now, most of the deaths we saw in this outbreak were completely preventable.” said Robert Kim. Farley, medical epidemiologist and professor in the Fielding School of Public Health at UCLA.
The death toll from the pandemic in the United States, now over 696,000, recently eclipsed the estimated 675,000 deaths from the influenza pandemic a century ago. The population of the United States is now about three times as large as it was then.
Doctors are increasingly turning to monoclonal antibody drugs to treat high-risk patients who become ill with Covid-19. The WSJ examines how therapies work and why they are important in saving lives. Illustration: Jacob Reynolds / WSJ
As of August 1, Florida has accounted for nearly a fifth of all Covid-19 deaths in the United States, according to Jason Salemi, epidemiologist and associate professor at the College of Public Health at the University of South Florida, who maintains a dashboard of Florida data. Until August 1, the state accounted for between 6% and 7% of deaths from Covid-19 in the United States, he said. Florida makes up about 6.5% of the U.S. population, according to U.S. Census data.
He believes that once data reporting catches up and fully covers the delta’s surge, it will show fatalities in Florida peaked in early September.
“The delta has burned the population,” he said.
There are signs, at least, that the vaccinations helped mitigate the worst outcomes during the Delta Wave, as many older people are vaccinated and the risk of death from Covid-19 increases with age. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 65% of the U.S. population eligible for vaccines are now fully vaccinated, but the rate exceeds 83% for people aged 65 and over.
Write to Jon Kamp at [email protected]
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