REGIONAL- There have been fewer COVID cases reported in the North Country in the past month than the count for Ely in a single week in early February, and while the state continues to average around 600 new cases a day, it’s a far cry from the days of January and 13,000-plus daily case counts.
So is the COVID pandemic finally behind us, or could it still be ahead of us?
Two years ago, in April 2020, President Donald Trump predicted COVID pandemic deaths would total about 60,000, and senior advisor Jared Kushner declared that “We’re on the other side of the medical aspect of this, and I think we’ve achieved all the different milestones that are needed, so the federal government rose to the challenge and this is a great success story.”
What followed was the pandemic’s first massive peak that November and December, and as Trump left office in January 2021 the country had just suffered its highest COVID death counts to that point, a combined total from December and January of nearly 160,000 deaths.
But vaccines had been developed and were being administered, the coronavirus peak had subsided, and by mid-summer 2021 it was President Joe Biden’s turn to declare a victory of sorts in a July 4 address.
“While the virus hasn’t been vanquished, we know this: It no longer controls our lives. It no longer paralyzes our nation. Today, we’re closer than ever to declaring our independence from a deadly virus,” Biden said.
Two months later, daily case counts in the U.S. were more than 11 times higher than on July 1, averaging 163,000 cases a day as the Delta wave swept across the country, and the short but huge Omicron wave hit an incredible cases-per-day average of just over 800,000. More than 385,000 people have lost their lives to COVID since Biden’s July 4 speech, bringing the U.S pandemic total just shy of one million deaths.
Michael Osterholm, the University of Minnesota infectious disease expert who has been tapped by national media for his expert analysis throughout the pandemic, wasn’t among those touting an early end to the pandemic. A year ago, as the numbers were coming down, he believed the worst days of the pandemic could well be ahead. Osterholm and writer Mark Olshaker addressed the uncertainty surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic in a recent article in Foreign Affairs.
“Trying to map out the future course of this disease requires humility,” they wrote. “Governments and international institutions must recognize that they cannot have all the answers and prepare for the unknown. The variants of the virus were simply not behaving according to the accepted pandemic model, which was based primarily on the experience of influenza. Nobody can say with any certainty when and how the pandemic will end.”
The threat of BA.2
The Omicron variant had such a large and rapid impact in part because it was more infectious than its predecessor Delta. Now, an even more infectious subvariant of Omicron, dubbed BA.2, has a solid foothold in Minnesota as elsewhere it is driving caseloads slowly upward again.
Northeast U.S. states from Maine to New Jersey have seen average daily case rates increase as much as 64 percent in the past two weeks, with BA.2 accounting for more than 84 percent of new cases, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
Genomic testing by the Minnesota Department of Health laboratory has determined that BA.2 is the dominant strain here, also confirmed by wastewater analysis in the seven-county Twin Cities metro area. The subvariant is responsible for halting the Omicron decline at a level seen early last August, as the Delta wave began creeping into the state, and for a small but noticeable uptick in daily case counts.
While regular COVID testing doesn’t identify what variant caused a particular case, recent history in the North Country zip codes monitored by the Timberjay is somewhat like that of the state.
Only 19 cases have been reported across the past four weeks in the region, but 12 of them, 63 percent, have been in the past two weeks, consistent with the slight upturn in cases statewide.
Hospitalizations and deaths, as they have elsewhere, have remained low. Health officials have expressed cautious optimism that BA.2 will not turn into another serious pandemic wave. However, that optimism is tempered by several realities that could give BA.2 or another COVID variant the fuel to spark another round of the pandemic.
A third of Minnesotans have not received either a two-dose regimen of Pfizer or Moderna vaccines or the one-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine. With what is known about the decline in vaccine efficacy over time, another concerning number is that less than half of the state’s eligible population has received the recommended booster shots to increase their immunity.
Data on Minnesotans who have gotten COVID-19 after being fully vaccinated, called breakthrough cases, indicate that breakthrough cases represented roughly 40 percent of all new cases diagnosed during the Delta and Omicron waves, which was due in part to the decline in vaccine effectiveness over time. But the data also continues to show that hospitalization and death rates from COVID infections are significantly lower among those who have been vaccinated.
So, while the overall numbers are far from where they were, the pandemic hasn’t gone away. COVID remains a risk, particularly for those who are unvaccinated, those who haven’t had boosters, those with compromised immune systems or other underlying health conditions, and those who are older.
And the ability the virus has to mutate, coupled with over half of the world’s population being unvaccinated has Osterholm still concerned about the future.
“The continuing spread of the virus could lead to the emergence of variants that might be even more transmissible than Omicron, at least as virulent as Delta, and even more capable of evading the immunity provided by vaccines or prior infection,” he said.