This week, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) for Europe, Hans Kluge, indicated that for the first time in these two years, the Old Continent is looking at a possible end to the coronavirus pandemic.
According to Kluge, the high vaccination rates in this area, added to the immunity already acquired by infections and the characteristics of omicron, a less severe variant of covid, offer a unique opportunity for a return to normalcy. At least for now.
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And although politicians in the US have begun to present this same scenario, the reality on the ground continues to show an opaque picture. Ómicron has wreaked havoc in the last two months and will continue to suffocate the country, at least for another month.
According to the statistics of the John Hopkins UniversityThe average number of daily deaths in the United States from the virus exceeds 2,500. A figure that has been on the rise since the beginning of the year and that this week increased another four percent.
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To put it in context, it is a level of deaths that already exceeds the previous peak that occurred in August after the onslaught of the delta variant and that is already close to the historical maximum that was reached at the beginning of the pandemicwhen there were still no biological agents to combat it and it exceeded 3,000 deaths per day.
One of the explanations for these terrible numbers is that, although omicron is less lethal, it is infecting many more people and hence the figures. But what has authorities disheartened is precisely the contrast between the US and most of Europe.
According to a report published by The New York Times, based on new statistics also published this week by the Centers for Infectious Disease Control (CDC), while in Europe and other nations the mortality rate so far in this new wave of the pandemic – the one produced by ómicron – is about 20 people per 100,000 inhabitants, that of the US is more than 40.
The figures, looked at country by country, are more chilling. Compared to Australia, Sweden, Canada and the Netherlands, the US rate is four times higher. And double in the case of Germany, France, Belgium and the United Kingdom.
In fact, there are only four countries within this group – Russia, Poland, the Czech Republic and Greece – that have worse rates than the US. But they are poorer nations, where treatments against covid are scarcer.
“That in a country with the resources that the United States has, with one of the best hospital systems in the world, this is happening makes you want to cry,” Devi Sridhar, head of the public health program at the University, said in that report. of Edinburgh (Scotland) and one of those who believes that both the United Kingdom and other nations in the area are ready to begin to eliminate the restrictions that have been imposed during the pandemic. Something that I would not recommend in the US while the numbers persist current, according to Sridhar. Scientists and health experts say that the underlying reason for this bad time that the great world power is experiencing is rather simple.
That in a country with the resources that the United States has, with one of the best hospital systems in the world, this is happening makes you want to cry
While many of these developed nations have already vaccinated 75 percent or more of their population with at least two doses of the biologic, in the US the figure is only 64 percent.
The disparity is equally accentuated when compared to the booster of the vaccine, or the so-called third dose, which according to experts has been key to preventing hospitalizations in this new wave of omicron: Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Great Britain and France have achieved apply the third dose to more than 45 percent of the population. But in the US the number is still under 30 percent.
A gap that is even more acute among those over 65, the most vulnerable group against covid. In total, almost 45 per cent of older adults in the country have not received their third dose when in places like England it is only four per cent.
Data that is more dramatic if analyzed in light of the mortality rates between vaccinated and unvaccinated. According to CDC statistics, a person over the age of 65 is 52 times more likely to die if they have not received the biological than those who have. For those over 50 the odds are 46 times higher.
Put in terms of the total population, the death rate for the unvaccinated is 7.8 percent per 100,000 population versus 0.1 percent for the vaccinated who already have at least one booster dose. According to another study by John Hopkins, between June and December of last year, 200,000 people died in the country who would have been saved if they had received the vaccine.
And a more recent one, from the Financial Times, maintains that the US would have avoided half of the hospitalizations that are going on in this wave of omicrons if it had vaccination rates similar to those of Europe.
That for a country that already accumulates the highest number of deaths during the pandemic (more than 900,000 or almost 20 percent of deaths worldwide) and the highest rate among developed nations if you use the size of its population. as matrix (2,756 people per million inhabitants).
“In the US we have normalized these high mortality rates. And what we are doing by wanting to declare the end of the pandemic is nothing more than accepting these figures as if they were expected, when they are not, ”says Anne Sosin, a health expert at Dartmouth University.
You look at these numbers about attitudes based on political affiliation and you wonder, ‘How did this happen to us?
The sad thing about this scenario that the US is going through is that it is not based on an absence of resources or capabilities. President Joe Biden himself has described the country as the world’s arsenal of vaccines and they have a robust health system similar to or superior to Europe’s. It is, rather, a product of the attitude of its citizens and the politicization of the pandemic.
An important sector of the country not only continues to resist vaccines but also ignores and even fights prevention measures, such as the use of face masks.
Much has to do with misinformation, which is rampant. But politicians, especially Republicans, have accentuated the problem by not combating it and using it for electoral purposes.
And the statistics also seem clear on that. According to a report by the Kaiser Foundation, while 91 percent of people associated with the Democratic Party are already vaccinated, only 62 percent of Republicans have. What’s more, right now in the US there are more unvaccinated Republicans (36 percent) than have gotten a third dose (32 percent).
“You look at these numbers about attitudes based on political affiliation and you wonder, ‘How did this happen to us?’ ”, said these days Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
SERGIO GOMEZ MASERI
TIME CORRESPONDENT
WASHINGTON
@sergom68
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