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ATLANTA – New figures from the state show Saturday is now the deadliest day in the COVID-19 pandemic to date.
The state has reported 191 new deaths from COVID-19. That’s five more than our previous record in February. This brings the average COVID-19 deaths in Georgia to 103 people every day.
But as deaths increase, cases continue to decline across the state. Georgia’s public health department reported 9,490 new cases of COVID-19 over the weekend.
The seven-day case average is now at its lowest level in more than a month.
The numbers come the same day the United States took another grim milestone: COVID-19 has now killed about as many Americans as the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-19 – around 675,000.
A century ago, America’s population was only a third of what it is today, which means the flu swept across the country in a much bigger and more deadly way.
But the COVID-19 crisis is a colossal tragedy in its own right anyway, especially given the incredible advances in scientific knowledge since then and the failure to make the most of the vaccines available this time around.
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Like the Spanish flu, the coronavirus may never completely disappear from our midst. Instead, scientists hope it becomes a mild seasonal insect as human immunity builds up through vaccination and repeated infections. It might take some time.
“We hope it will be like a cold, but there is no guarantee,” said Emory University biologist Rustom Antia, who suggests an optimistic scenario in which it could happen in a few years.
For now, the pandemic still has the United States and other parts of the world firmly in its jaws.
While the delta-fueled infection spike may have peaked, deaths in the United States average more than 1,900 per day, the highest level since early March, and the overall toll nationwide topped 675,000 on Monday, according to the count kept by Johns Hopkins University, although the actual number is believed to be higher.
Winter could bring a new surge, with the influential University of Washington model projecting that an estimated 100,000 more Americans will die from COVID-19 by January 1, bringing the overall toll in the United States to 776 000.
Globally, around 43% of the population has received at least one dose, according to Our World in Data, with some African countries just starting to get their first injections.
“We know that all pandemics end,” said Dr. Jeremy Brown, director of emergency care research at the National Institutes of Health, who has written a book on influenza. “They can do terrible things while they are raging.”
COVID-19 could have been a lot less deadly in the United States if more people had been vaccinated faster, “and we still have the opportunity to turn the tide,” Brown said. “We often lose sight of how lucky we are to take these things for granted. “
Current vaccines work extremely well in preventing serious illness and death from variants of the virus that have emerged so far.
It will be crucial for scientists to ensure that the constantly changing virus has not changed enough to evade vaccines or cause serious illness in unvaccinated children, Antia said.
The Associated Press contributed to this article.
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