Omicron drives US deaths higher than in fall’s delta…

Omicron, the highly contagious coronavirus variant sweeping across the country, is driving the daily American death toll higher than during last fall’s delta wave, with deaths likely to keep rising for days or even weeks.

The seven-day rolling average for daily new COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. has been climbing since mid-November, reaching 2,267 on Thursday and surpassing a September peak of 2,100 when delta was the dominant variant.

Now omicron is estimated to account for nearly all the virus circulating in the nation. And even though it causes less severe disease for most people, the fact that it is more transmissible means more people are falling ill and dying.

“Omicron will push us over a million deaths,” said Andrew Noymer, a public health professor at the University of California, Irvine. “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.”

The average daily death toll is now at the same level as last February, when the country was slowly coming off its all-time high of 3,300 a day.

More Americans are taking precautionary measures against the virus than before the omicron surge, according to a AP-NORC poll this week. But many people, fatigued by crisis, are returning to some level of normality with hopes that vaccinations or prior infections will protect them.

Omicron symptoms are often milder, and some infected people show none, researchers agree. But like the flu, it can be deadly, especially for people who are older, have other health problems or who are unvaccinated.

“Importantly, ‘milder’ does not mean ‘mild,’” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said this week during a White House briefing.

Until recently, Chuck Culotta was a healthy middle-aged man who ran a power-washing business in Milford, Delaware. As the omicron wave was ravaging the Northeast, he felt the first symptoms before Christmas and tested positive on Christmas Day. He died less than a week later, on Dec. 31, nine days short of his 51st birthday.

He was unvaccinated, said his brother, Todd, because he had questions about the long-term effects of the vaccine.

“He just wasn’t sure it was the right thing to do — yet,” said Todd Culotta, who got his shots during the summer.

At one urban hospital in Kansas, 50 COVID-19 patients have died this month and more than 200 are being treated. University of Kansas Hospital in Kansas City, Kansas, posted a video from its morgue showing bagged bodies in a refrigeration unit and a worker marking one white body bag with the word “COVID.”

“This is real,” said Ciara Wright, the hospital’s decedent affairs coordinator. “Our concerns are, ‘Are the funeral homes going to come fast enough?’ We do have access to a refrigerated truck. We don’t want to use it if we don’t have to.”

Dr. Katie Dennis, a pathologist who does autopsies for the health system, said the morgue has been at or above capacity almost every day in January, “which is definitely unusual.”

With more than 878,000 deaths, the United States has the largest COVID-19 toll of any nation.

During the coming week, almost every U.S. state will see a faster increase in deaths, although deaths have peaked in a few states, including New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Maryland, Alaska and Georgia, according to the COVID-19 Forecast Hub.

New hospital admissions have started to fall for all age groups, according to CDC data, and a drop in deaths is expected to follow.

“In a pre-pandemic world, during some flu seasons, we see 10,000 or 15,000 deaths. We see that in the course of a week sometimes with COVID,” said Nicholas Reich, who aggregates coronavirus projections for the hub in collaboration with the CDC.

“The toll and the sadness and suffering is staggering and very humbling,” said Reich, a professor of biostatistics at University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

In other developments:

— The White House said Friday that about 60 million households ordered 240 million home-test kits under a new government program to expand testing opportunities. The government also said it has shipped tens of millions of masks to convenient locations around the country, including deliveries Friday to community centers in Delaware, Maryland and Virginia.

— The national drugstore chain Walgreens is among pharmacies receiving the government-provided masks. The chain has started offering N95 masks for free at several stores, as long as supplies last. The company’s website lists locations in the Midwest for the initial wave of stores offering masks, but Walgreens said more stores will offer them soon.

— The leading organization for state and local public health officials has called on governments to stop conducting widespread contact tracing, saying it’s no longer necessary. The Association of State and Territorial Health Officials urged governments to focus contact tracing efforts on high-risk, vulnerable populations such as people in homeless shelters and nursing homes.

———

Associated Press writers Heather Hollingsworth in Mission, Kansas; Tom Murphy in Indianapolis; and Jim Salter in O’Fallon, Missouri, contributed to this report.

Covid News: C.D.C. Study Shows Third Shots Better Protect…

Unvaccinated health care workers in roughly half the United States are required to get a first dose of a Covid vaccine by Thursday under a federal mandate that has understaffed hospitals and nursing homes bracing to lose more workers.

The Biden administration’s mandate, which is to take effect in stages, will ultimately affect about 10 million health care workers in 76,000 hospitals, nursing homes, home-health agencies and other providers that participate in Medicaid and Medicare.

Thursday’s deadline follows a Supreme Court decision on Jan. 13 that blocked a vaccine-or-testing mandate for large employers but upheld a vaccination requirement for health care workers at facilities subsidized by federal funds. These medical facilities will lose funding if they do not comply, federal officials said.

The vaccine requirement goes into effect this week in states that did not challenge the mandate in court, including California, Hawaii, Minnesota and New York, as well as all U.S. territories.

Health care workers in most of the remaining states, where a lower court had blocked the mandate, will have until Feb. 14 to receive a first dose. For Texas, the deadline falls on Feb. 22. To keep their jobs, all health care workers must be fully vaccinated a month after their first dose.

Some in the nursing home industry say the mandate could exacerbate staffing shortages and threaten care for older patients. They have repeatedly pushed for a testing option for their workers.

Mark Parkinson, the chief executive of the American Health Care Association, a trade group representing thousands of nursing homes across the country, said in a statement last week that its members remained “concerned that the repercussions of the vaccine mandate among health care workers will be devastating to an already decimated long-term care work force.”

A little over 80 percent of the staff at the trade group’s nursing homes is fully vaccinated, Mr. Parkinson said. He said providers had made “valiant efforts” to inoculate their staff and should not be penalized.

Mary Susan Tack-Yurek, the chief quality officer and a partner at Quality Life Services, a nursing home chain in western Pennsylvania, said her company had achieved a high vaccination rate without a mandate. More than 96 percent of the chain’s employees are vaccinated or have a medical exemption, she said, a steep rise from October, when less than half of its staff was inoculated.

“We strongly support the vaccine and its effectiveness and authenticity, but we respect individual choice,” she said.

Supporters of mandates say they have spurred millions of hesitant Americans to get their shots and are needed to stem the spread of the virus, especially among vulnerable hospital patients and nursing home residents.

Nursing homes have already exhausted various financial incentives to encourage voluntary vaccination, including lotteries and giveaways, said Dr. Brian McGarry, a health researcher at the University of Rochester who specializes in researching long-term health care.

“I think the only kind of tool that’s left in the policy tool kit is a blanket mandate,” he said.

Latest on the Omicron Variant, Covid Cases and Vaccine…

Unvaccinated health care workers in roughly half the United States are required to get a first dose of a Covid vaccine by Thursday under a federal mandate that has understaffed hospitals and nursing homes bracing to lose more workers.

The Biden administration’s mandate, which is to take effect in stages, will ultimately affect about 10 million health care workers in 76,000 hospitals, nursing homes, home-health agencies and other providers that participate in Medicaid and Medicare.

Thursday’s deadline follows a Supreme Court decision on Jan. 13 that blocked a vaccine-or-testing mandate for large employers but upheld a vaccination requirement for health care workers at facilities subsidized by federal funds. These medical facilities will lose funding if they do not comply, federal officials said.

The vaccine requirement goes into effect this week in states that did not challenge the mandate in court, including California, Hawaii, Minnesota and New York, as well as all U.S. territories.

Health care workers in most of the remaining states, where a lower court had blocked the mandate, will have until Feb. 14 to receive a first dose. For Texas, the deadline falls on Feb. 22. To keep their jobs, all health care workers must be fully vaccinated a month after their first dose.

Some in the nursing home industry say the mandate could exacerbate staffing shortages and threaten care for older patients. They have repeatedly pushed for a testing option for their workers.

Mark Parkinson, the chief executive of the American Health Care Association, a trade group representing thousands of nursing homes across the country, said in a statement last week that its members remained “concerned that the repercussions of the vaccine mandate among health care workers will be devastating to an already decimated long-term care work force.”

A little over 80 percent of the staff at the trade group’s nursing homes is fully vaccinated, Mr. Parkinson said. He said providers had made “valiant efforts” to inoculate their staff and should not be penalized.

Mary Susan Tack-Yurek, the chief quality officer and a partner at Quality Life Services, a nursing home chain in western Pennsylvania, said her company had achieved a high vaccination rate without a mandate. More than 96 percent of the chain’s employees are vaccinated or have a medical exemption, she said, a steep rise from October, when less than half of its staff was inoculated.

“We strongly support the vaccine and its effectiveness and authenticity, but we respect individual choice,” she said.

Supporters of mandates say they have spurred millions of hesitant Americans to get their shots and are needed to stem the spread of the virus, especially among vulnerable hospital patients and nursing home residents.

Nursing homes have already exhausted various financial incentives to encourage voluntary vaccination, including lotteries and giveaways, said Dr. Brian McGarry, a health researcher at the University of Rochester who specializes in researching long-term health care.

“I think the only kind of tool that’s left in the policy tool kit is a blanket mandate,” he said.

Yes, Omicron Is Loosening Its Hold. But the Pandemic…

US coronavirus hospitalizations plateau nationwide after big Northeast drop…

On Wednesday, U.S. hospitals reported treating about 150,000 coronavirus patients, down from a record 160,000 last week. Per capita admissions are starting to decline sharply in the Northeast, to about 50 per 100,000 residents, on par with the South, where hospitalizations are leveling off. Hospitalizations are also falling in the Midwest but rising in the West.

Despite U.S. cases decline, the country doesn’t have ‘control’…

On Wednesday, infections declined to an average of 601,302 in the seven-day average, and current hospitalization have leveled off to 148,710, according to data compiled by The Washington Post. These numbers do not indicate the country has “sufficient control,” a critical point the nation must reach so the virus doesn’t “dominate” our lives, Anthony S. Fauci said at a briefing by the White House covid-19 task force. Fauci said the nation can still reach some level of normalcy with effective tools, referring to vaccinations, boosters and antivirals.

U.S. COVID daily death toll at highest level since…

The U.S. daily death toll from COVID-19 rose to its highest level since last winter’s peak on Tuesday, according to a New York Times tracker and other sources, after the surge in cases in December and January driven by the highly transmissible omicron variant.

Deaths lag cases and hospitalizations, with the former now finally coming down from their highs, while the latter appear to be reaching a peak.