Covid 19 Pandemic By Country

"A study of US prison deaths at the height of the Covid-19 crisis in 2020 has found that mortality rates soared by 77% relative to 2019, or more than three times the increase in the general population. The study, published by Science Advances last week, is the most comprehensive analysis of in-custody deaths since 2020. The report found that “Covid-19 was the primary driver for increases in mortality due to natural causes; some states also experienced substantial increases due to unnatural causes.”"

"Until the pandemic, longevity for Americans with degrees continued to increase in step with the world’s wealthiest countries; even after COVID-19 increased mortality in rich countries, this demographic group suffered only a modest decrease in adult life expectancy. But Americans without a bachelor’s degree had a starkly different trajectory. They had already begun to suffer serious declines in longevity before the pandemic; when COVID hit, their adult life expectancy plummeted."

"Its lead author, Naomi Sugie, an associate professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California at Irvine, told Courthouse News that the actual toll of Covid-19 in the prison system had been little understood. “We staffed a hotline and started this archival project hearing what people were going through in California prisons,” Sugie told the outlet. “And the conditions that people were describing were so dire and upsetting and really just violations of their health and, some may argue, human rights.” Sugie began studying the effect of Covid-19 in California prisons after they imposed containment lockdowns in 2020. The PrisonPandemic project found that the institutions reduced facility communication and transparency down to zero with some facilities not recording causes of death that year at all. The authors write that there has been no publicly available information about mortality in US prisons since 2019 despite the Death in Custody Reporting Act passed in 2000 and reauthorized in 2014 that requires the collection of information regarding the death of any person who is under arrest, en route to be incarcerated, incarcerated at a municipal or county jail, state prison, or other local or state correctional facility. The 2022 Bureau of Justice statistics found that roughly 2,500 prisoners died of Covid-related causes between March 2020 and February 2021, but the number did not include a rise in mortality rates of natural deaths or unnatural deaths. “These steep increases suggest systemic failures that simultaneously increased risk of illness and limited access to medical care,” the authors of the study wrote. The study also found that pandemic-related lockdowns and restrictions on movement, including isolation, visitor prohibitions and solitary confinement in place of medical isolation, designed to mitigate infection had “increased stress, mental health challenges, and violence exacerbating the risk of deaths due to unnatural causes, such as drug overdoses, suicide, and violence”. Sugie told the outlet that “for all of those deaths that are related to the pandemic, for various ways, we don’t know about them because they’re not officially coded as Covid-related”. Just like in the general population, she added, a lot of states did not test systemically, “so even if someone died of Covid, their death may not have been recorded as Covid-related”."

"Many economists now believe that the pandemic stimulus was key to the U.S. economy performing so much better than those of other advanced countries. The stimulus also might have played an underappreciated role in reducing crime by keeping local governments and the community organizations they support afloat. “The only reason cities did not completely fall apart during the pandemic was because of a huge boost in federal funding,” Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at Princeton University who studies urban crime, told me. “I’m very convinced that is a central part of the explanation for why violence fell in ’22 and ’23.”"

"The story was not as rosy for Americans over 65, for whom the poverty rate rose to 14.1 percent, de-spite an 8.7 percent cost-of-living increase in Social Security payments. Labor force participation among older people remains depressed, as many lost jobs and have had a difficult time re-entering the workplace. “People became more isolated, experienced significantly more health problems,” said Jess Maurer, the executive director of the Maine Council on Aging. “Older people had a harder time coming out of the pandemic, coming back into the community.”"

"Poverty increased sharply last year in the United States, particularly among children, as living costs rose and federal programs that provided aid to families during the pandemic were allowed to expire. The poverty rate rose to 12.4 percent in 2022 from 7.8 percent in 2021, the largest one-year jump on record, the Census Bureau said Tuesday. Poverty among children more than doubled, to 12.4 percent, from a record low of 5.2 percent the year before. Those figures are according to the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which factors in the impact of government assistance and geographical differences in the cost of living. The increases followed two years of historically large declines in poverty, driven primarily by safety net programs that were created or expanded during the pandemic. Those included a series of direct payments to households in 2020 and 2021, enhanced unemployment and nutrition benefits, increased rental assistance and an expanded child tax credit, which briefly provided a guaranteed income to fami-lies with children. Nearly all of those programs had expired by last year, however, leaving many families struggling to stay ahead of rising prices despite a strong job market and improving economy. Overall poverty now looks much the way it did in 2019, with the notable difference that financial hardship has declined among Black households, reflecting higher incomes in recent years. One pandemic program that did not expire was a temporary freeze in Medicaid terminations, a move that allowed the program to cover more Americans than ever. Because of that program, the share of Americans without health insurance matched a record low last year of 7.9 percent. But states are un-winding that temporary coverage, and the uninsured rate has probably increased in recent months."

"Congress passed the expanded child tax credit as part of the American Rescue Plan, President Biden’s pandemic-relief package, in early 2021. But while other Covid-era relief programs were always intend-ed to expire once the emergency passed, supporters hoped to make the expanded child credit perma-nent. That didn’t happen. Faced with united opposition from congressional Republicans as well as some conservative Democrats, Mr. Biden dropped his effort to extend the program at the end of 2021; a renewed push failed again last year. The rise in poverty in 2022, social policy experts said, was the inevitable result of that decision. “Today’s Census report shows the dire consequences of congres-sional Republicans’ refusal to extend the enhanced Child Tax Credit, even as they advance costly cor-porate tax cuts,” Mr. Biden said in a statement. Correspondingly, the highest increases in poverty were in the South, where research has shown the child tax credit had the greatest effect, and among Alaska Natives and American Indians, for whom the poverty rate rebounded to 23.2 percent."

"Many measures of Covid-19 and other public health surveillance rely on people to seek out clinical testing or medical treatment, and those behaviors have changed over the past few years. Wastewater surveillance offers a more consistent approach by monitoring the amount of virus shed in sewage systems. But interpreting that data can be complicated — and with Covid, wastewater levels can’t be directly translated to case counts. The amount of virus that an infected person sheds depends on a many factors, including the presence of antibodies from a vaccine or previous infection and the severity of the current infection. Data from Biobot Analytics, a biotechnology firm that has partnered with the CDC, shows that wastewater concentrations of the coronavirus are similar to what they were at the start of the first winter surge in 2020. But now that the vast majority of people in the US have some immunity to Covid-19 through vaccination, infection or both, those same viral concentrations could translate to a larger number of infected individuals with milder — but still contagious — infections."

"“There is more transmission out there than what the surveillance data indicates,” said Janet Hamilton, executive director of the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists. “And we should be paying attention to it, because we are starting to see an increase.”"

"But despite the clear signs of a summer surge, the US has been living in a “fantasy world” where people pretend Covid-19 is “not relevant,” Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House Coronavirus Response Task Force coordinator during the Trump administration, told ABC’s “Start Here” podcast. “We wanted to make it like flu because that was easier, but it’s never going to be like flu,” Birx said, explaining that Covid-19 comes in more frequent waves, makes people sicker, kills more people and can have longer-term complications such as long Covid. “So let’s just all agree it’s not flu. It will never be flu. Following it and surveying for it like we do for flu will never be adequate in this country.” Precautions like masking and staying up-to-date on vaccinations are especially important as this rise in Covid-19 carries into the broader respiratory virus season, experts say. “With every respiratory disease season — whether it’s Covid, whether it’s influenza, whether it’s RSV — those increases can impact different individuals in different ways, and there are always severe outcomes associated with respiratory disease season,” Hamilton said. “Now is the time for us to be practicing good respiratory etiquette. Now is the time for us to remind ourselves to think about our own individual health status and those individuals that we may be around.”"

"Critics of the child tax credit and other pandemic aid have argued that the rapid rebound in poverty after the programs’ expiration is evidence that the progress made against poverty in recent years was, in effect, artificial. Michael Strain, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, argued that programs that offer incentives to work — such as the earned-income tax credit and the standard child tax credit — have led to more sustainable gains. “Yes, this alleviated child poverty, but it didn’t really do a whole lot to encourage self-sufficiency,” he said. Progressives take a different lesson: Government programs succeeded in lifting millions of people out of poverty. An analysis by researchers at Columbia University on Tuesday found that child poverty would have been nearly 50 percent lower in 2022 if the expanded tax credit had remained in place. The programs might also have had longer-run benefits, they argue, but ended before those effects could be seen. “The last few years just illustrated in an incredible way the power of effective government intervention,” said Arloc Sherman, a vice president at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive research organization. “The last couple years, through a plunge in poverty and what is now a record single-year increase in poverty in 2022, have shown that poverty is very much a policy choice.”"

"Four years ago, the country was brought to its knees by a world-historic disaster. COVID-19 hospitalized nearly 7 million Americans and killed more than a million; it’s still killing hundreds each week. It shut down schools and forced people into social isolation. Almost overnight, most of the country was thrown into a state of high anxiety—then, soon enough, grief and mourning. But the country has not come together to sufficiently acknowledge the tragedy it endured. As clinical psychiatrists, we see the effects of such emotional turmoil every day, and we know that when it’s not properly processed, it can result in a general sense of unhappiness and anger—exactly the negative emotional state that might lead a nation to misperceive its fortunes. The pressure to simply move on from the horrors of 2020 is strong. Who wouldn’t love to awaken from that nightmare and pretend it never happened? Besides, humans have a knack for sanitizing our most painful memories. In a 2009 study, participants did a remarkably poor job of remembering how they felt in the days after the 9/11 attacks, likely because those memories were filtered through their current emotional state. Likewise, a study published in Nature last year found that people’s recall of the severity of the 2020 COVID threat was biased by their attitudes toward vaccines months or years later."

"We often view the pandemic’s turmoil as a failure of American governance and society. We couldn’t agree on masks, vaccines, social distancing, school closures, abstract goals, or concrete facts. These failures cost lives and livelihoods. Flip the lens, however, and another reality comes into focus: this was also a time when many people had access to food, shelter, and medical care with a consistency they’d never had before. After three years of COVID life, it’s natural to welcome a return to normal. But, for many, normal is a precarious place."

"During the pandemic, states received additional federal funds for their Medicaid programs, and were generally prohibited from disenrolling people once they became eligible. As a result, millions secured stable health coverage, and the country’s over-all uninsured rate fell to eight per cent. (Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program now cover ninety-three million people—more than one in four Americans.) But last month states were permitted to again start purging the rolls, launching what has been called the Great Unwinding. According to government estimates, up to fifteen million people could lose health coverage in the coming months."

"The current high inflation rate can be attributed to many different factors, many of which are a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. Gapen pins rising prices on three general causes — increases in household demand and supply-chain shortages due to the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the presence of a strong labor market. Generally, the story goes something like this: At the start of the pandemic, consumers began spending less because of lockdowns, and in turn, started saving more. Then, when Covid-19 restrictions eased, people started spending more again. Companies, however, couldn’t keep up with this increased consumer demand — many of them had reduced production because of the pandemic and experienced shipping delays as well as shortages in labor and key inputs. The result of all these things? Higher prices for most goods and services."

"Our understanding of COVID often suffers from a linguistic determinism. The words we use encourage a binary conception of viral threat: we are in an acute state of emergency—a pandemic—or we have entered a long-awaited, tractable endemic phase. But, of course, an endemic pathogen can be all kinds of bad. Tuberculosis has infected humans since at least the Stone Age and is the thirteenth leading cause of death in the world, killing a million and a half people a year. COVID seems to have settled into its own punishing form of endemicity. Even without a major surge this past winter, it has killed some forty thousand people in this country so far in 2023 and is on track to have taken tens of thousands more lives by the end of it. Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that COVID was the fourth leading cause of death in the U.S. in 2022. This year, it will likely remain a top-ten killer. But, because the toll is concentrated among older and medically vulnerable people, it quickly recedes from the public consciousness."

"Soaring public deficits that have mounted due to COVID will call for harsher austerity measures in the near future. In February 2021, the Harvard economist Summers, speaking at Princeton University about the inflationary risks of the Biden Administration's proposal to issue a cash stimulus to the American public, told the audience "there is no compelling economic case for a stimulus." If governments were to provide households with "more than what they need," those households' spending would throw off the delicate stasis of the economy: "the spending propensity out of [middle class households] would be far greater than the spending propensity economists usually estimate from wealth which is driven by fluctuations in the stock market." Spending by people who shouldn't spend, Summers warns, would cause inflationary harm to the economy of the wealthy."

"In March, 2020, as the coronavirus began to spread, Congress authorized enhanced benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which provides support to some forty million people. The following year, the share of households with kids who were food insecure fell to twelve per cent—a shockingly high number, perhaps, in the world’s richest country, but the lowest since we started keeping track, more than two decades ago. This year, states began rolling back the extra benefits, and SNAP recipients are expected to lose, on average, around a third of their monthly allotments. Similarly, between the pre-pandemic period and the emergence of Omicron, in late 2021, the child poverty rate fell by nearly half—from around ten per cent to five per cent—with especially large declines among Black and Hispanic children, owing in part to child tax credits made available through the American Rescue Plan. Nearly all low-income families used the extra money to cover basic expenses: food, clothing, rent, utilities. When the tax credits expired, at the end of 2021, families immediately reported more difficulty in paying for such necessities."

"Gapen also notes that the shift away from spending on goods and toward services has affected inflation. While consumers purchased more goods during the pandemic since they were stuck at home, many are now spending more on services, such as travel and concerts, than they had been."

""As we’ve figured out how we’re going to live with this disease in perpetuity, it makes sense to contextualize it as another illness that Americans have to face," said Dr. Leana Wen, an emergency physician and professor at George Washington University."

"By this point in the pandemic, most Americans have had at least one bout of COVID. For children under age 18, more than 80% of them have been infected, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates."

""It would not surprise me if we have a similar magnitude of deaths from Covid as we do from flu," said Dr. Chris Murray, the director of the IHME."

"In 2019, someone born in the U.S. had a life expectancy of nearly 80 years. In 2020, because of the pandemic, that dropped to 77 years. In 2021 life-span dropped again — to 76.1 years. And for some Americans, life expectancy is even lower, according to a provisional analysis from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "The results of this study are very disturbing," says Dr. Steven Woolf, a professor of population health and health equity at Virginia Commonwealth University. "This shows that U.S. life expectancy in 2021 was even lower than in 2020," he says. Other high-income countries have seen a rebound in life expectancy, which Woolf says makes the U.S. results, "all the more tragic." One of the most dramatic drops in life expectancy in 2021 was among American Indian and Alaskan Native people. Between 2020 and 2021 the life expectancy for this group fell by almost two years, from 67.1 in 2020 to 65.2 in 2021. "That's horrific," Woolf says. "The losses in the Native American population have been terrible during the COVID-19 pandemic. And it reflects a lot of barriers that tribal communities face in getting access to care," he says."

"Nuzzo and Hanage both say they expect the gap in deaths by political affiliation to shrink with time. As more Americans survive COVID infections, their chances of death from subsequent bouts with COVID will decrease. But Nuzzo says, new people are being born every day, and others are aging into different risk categories. Vaccination will likely remain an important tool for controlling COVID into the future. "The fact that we haven't gotten to the bottom of this hesitation," she warns, "is setting us up for bigger problems." And Hanage foresees even deeper problems if a subset of far-right politicians are willing to "take vaccines and turn them into a wedge issue for political gain." He worries that deeply Republican parts of the country will soon start to refuse vital childhood vaccines, such as the measles, mumps and rubella shot, which prevent outbreaks of other infectious diseases. "It's part of the long-term damage that happens when you have politicians relentlessly trying to denigrate it and turn it into a political football," he says."

"The COVID-19 pandemic has in effect wiped out the health gains that the U.S. has made in the 20th century," says John Haaga, a member of Maryland's Commission on Aging. "To have this second year of crash basically wiping out the meager gains made during the century is really pretty shocking," he says. The U.S. has been lagging for years in making improvements in things like heart disease — the country's number one killer — and the life expectancy gap between the U.S. and other countries has been growing for decades, Haaga says. "A lot of much poorer countries do much better than us in life expectancy," he says. "It's not genetics, it's that we have been falling behind for 50 years."

"If we were to see the number of deaths from Covid down to what we see on an annual basis for flu — somewhere in the 20,000-a-year range — we’ll then say that the pandemic is clearly over," said Dr. Eric Toner, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. Rachael Piltch-Loeb, a research associate at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said that in declaring the pandemic over now, it "seems like we are endorsing this level of disease burden and mortality associated with the virus." And Dr. Kavita Patel, a primary care physician who was a policy adviser during the Obama administration, said the virus has to become more predictable before the pandemic can be considered over. "We need to have some regular patterns, kind of like the flu, so that we can expect certain timing for sickness, certain timing for hospitalizations," she said. Given that's not the case, Patel said, she found Biden’s declaration "a bit disturbing to hear."

"“A lot of service prices fell as consumers weren’t traveling on airlines and going to hotels. In the past 12 months, many of those prices have rebounded,” says Gapen. “The unemployment rate is 3.6%. There’s a high demand for labor and strong wage gains. Labor is the number one input for services production. In general, it’s about half of any cost of production on the service job.”"

"We are not suggesting that the entire country has PTSD from COVID. In fact, the majority of people who are exposed to trauma do not go on to exhibit the symptoms of PTSD. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t deeply affected. In our lifetime, COVID posed an unprecedented threat in both its overwhelming scope and severity; it left most Americans unable to protect themselves and, at times, at a loss to comprehend what was happening. That meets the clinical definition of trauma: an overwhelming experience in which you are threatened with serious physical or psychological harm."

"We’re also working toward assuming that there’s no government order — or American order for vaccines."

"However, the expiration dates for at-home COVID-19 diagnostic tests may be extended as additional stability data is collected. You can check the Expiration Date column of the List of Authorized At-Home OTC COVID-19 Diagnostic Tests to see if the expiration date for your at-home OTC COVID-19 test has been extended and how to find any new expiration date."

"One million empty chairs around the dinner table. Each an irreplaceable loss. Each leaving behind a family, a community, and a nation forever changed because of this pandemic."

"Here we are, trapped in the sky with our 8-month-old unmasked baby"

"I think we should expect, David, that over the next couple of weeks, we are going to see an uptick in cases – and hopefully there is enough background immunity so that we don’t wind up with a lot of hospitalizations"

"The COVID-19 pandemic is one of the most manipulated infectious disease events in history, characterized by official lies in an unending stream lead by government bureaucracies, medical associations, medical boards, the media, and international agencies. We have witnessed a long list of unprecedented intrusions into medical practice, including attacks on medical experts, destruction of medical careers among doctors refusing to participate in killing their patients and a massive regimentation of health care, led by non-qualified individuals with enormous wealth, power and influence."

"The COVID-19 pandemic has, of course, brought increased attention to the mental health of workers in our healthcare system. And we have asked so much of you over the course of these last two-plus years. Some of you held the hands of those who were dying on behalf of their loved ones. All of you worked around the clock long before we understood how COVID-19 spread or what it did to the body. And before you were even vaccinated or had protective equipment — the kind you needed — you were still here doing this work around the clock. You spent hour after hour, many in a windowless room, unable to speak about how you were feeling or only being able to speak with a small group who truly could understand what you were going through. But you did it nonetheless. So there is an urgent need that we have, I believe, to address all of this and to address, of course, what has resulted: the stress, the burnout, the mental health challenges that you experienced most recently because of the pandemic."

"[it is time to move] back to more normal routines."

"Under the new guidance, masks won’t be required indoors if average new cases fall below 200 per 100,000 residents, there are fewer than 10 Covid hospital admissions per 100,000 people over the past week and Covid patients are taking up less than 10% of available hospital beds, based on a seven-day average. If cases exceed 200 per 100,000 people, masks would be required indoors if new weekly Covid admissions exceed 10 per 100,000 people and patients are taking up 10% or more of hospital beds, based on a seven-day average, according to the CDC’s new guidance."

"We are no longer going to let COVID-19 dictate how we live. The pandemic and its restrictive measures should end when [COVID-19] death rates decline to those of a bad influenza season. In the United States, a country with 330 million people, the transition to the next normal can occur when the National Center of Health Statistics measures the direct mortality from major respiratory illnesses to average 165 deaths per day and 1,150 per week. The death toll from [COVID-19] going into March 2022 is over 10 times higher"

"With COVID cases steadily declining, the time has come for the city to move on from the broad approach of the eviction moratoria and instead drive more deliberate and focused efforts to support those most in need"

"“We don’t know why that data isn’t showing up in the FPDS database, as it should be visible and searchable. Army Contracting Command is looking into the issue and working to remedy it as quickly as possible,”"

"With widespread population immunity, the overall risk of severe disease is now generally lower. This updated approach focuses on directing our prevention efforts towards protecting people of high risk for severe illness and preventing hospitals and health-care systems from being overwhelmed."

"We are moving forward safely, back to more normal routines. COVID-19 need no longer control our lives."

""How you vote should not predict whether you die of COVID," says Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Brown University School of Public Health. The social causes of the divide are complex, but the immediate reason is dead simple: Trump-leaning counties have far lower vaccination rates than those that went for President Biden. NPR's analysis showed that the gap was 21 points, with 81% of adults vaccinated in heavily-Biden counties compared to 60% of adults in counties that went for Trump."

"For those of us who value liberty, these past two years have been a bad dream. It seems like we fell asleep in early 2020 and woke up in 1984! They said that if we just put on a mask and stayed home for two weeks, we’d be able to return to normal. The two weeks came and went and instead of going back to normal they added more restrictions. These past two years have been a story of moving goalposts and “experts” like Anthony Fauci constantly contradicting themselves. Early on, in April 2020, I warned in an article titled “Next in Coronavirus Tyranny: Forced Vaccinations and ‘Digital Certificates,’” that the ultimate goal of the “two weeks” crowd was to force vaccines and a “vaccine passport” on Americans. My concerns were at the time written off as just another conspiracy theory. But less than a year later that “conspiracy theory” became conspiracy fact. I am not happy about being right on this. The introduction of vaccine passports was from the beginning my worst nightmare. The idea that you must “show your papers” to participate in society is a concept that is totally opposed to a free society. It is inhuman."

"The New York State Department of Health appeared to announce this week that non-white New Yorkers would receive priority over whites in receiving “extremely limited” Covid-19 therapies for people at risk."

"During the pandemic, three quarters of workers said it was very or somewhat difficult to make ends meet, 40 percent said they couldn’t come up with $400 in the event of an emergency and around 20 percent said they went hungry because they couldn’t afford enough to eat, according to the Shift Project, an ongoing survey of American hourly wage workers operated by Harvard University sociologist Daniel Schneider. Most also do not get paid sick leave and have continued to work when ill because they cannot afford to miss a paycheck, he said. “These are the workers facing the virus, and we are asking them to buy high-quality masks and pay for rapid tests?” Schneider said. “For many of these workers, it’s just not a possibility — this is about food on the table. And when you face that impossible choice, the devolution of pandemic prevention to impoverished workers is really unrealistic.”"

"Half a billion, though impressive-sounding, does not come even close to what's needed"

"This virus is doing what this virus does. We don’t understand why surges start, we don't understand why they end"

"[..the Biden administration needs to provide enough tests] for all American families to be able to test twice a week, every week. It needs to become the norm to test before going to school and work, and before families and friends have dinner together"

"[T]he 500 million tests the administration is distributing are not nearly enough, many experts say, especially for families who have children in school and parents back at work. “It’s good, but it’s really just a drop in the bucket,” said Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist and senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists. "Considering that we need to test millions and millions of people regularly, 500 million tests is about one and a half per person. It’s really negligible.”"