Since the early period after the COVID-19 outbreak in March last year, the United States, for the first time, has seen virus deaths fall under 300 for a day.
This, as the push to vaccinate Americans also reached an achievement on Monday, having covered 150 million people in the US who will complete a vaccine against the virus.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said coronavirus became the third cause of death in American last year but it slid out of the list of killers as the outbreak became manageable at present.
More people in the US lost their lives in accidents, strokes, chronic lower respiratory diseases, and Alzheimer’s disease than from COVID-19, CDC data shows.
While real numbers are believed to be higher, recorded COVID-19 deaths in the US are beyond 600, 000, while it hits near 3.9 internationally.
The CDC said about 45 percent of the people in the US have received their complete vaccines while more than 53 percent have been vaccinated with at least a single dose. But public health experts sound alarm over the flop on the demand for vaccine shots.
The falling infection rates and casualties are cause for festivities, Dr. Ana Diez Roux of Drexel University’s school of public health said, warning that the virus can probably still spread in some states with low vaccination progress like Alabama, Idaho, Mississippi, Wyoming, and Louisiana.
“So far it looks like the vaccines we have are effective against the variants that are circulating,” the public health expert said. “But the more time the virus is jumping from person to person, the more time there is for variants to develop, and some of those could be more dangerous.”
Professor of epidemiology Amber D’Souza from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, meanwhile, cautioned that the fall can result in another surge of infections which will be less serious and focused in areas with low vaccination rates.
“So much depends on what happens over the summer and what happens with children,” the professor said. “Anyone who is not vaccinated can become infected and transmit the virus.”
