While the Democratic camp’s campaign is being disrupted by calls for Joe Biden to withdraw due to his age and health, this announcement from the White House comes at a bad time: the President of the United States, a candidate for his own succession, tested positive for Covid on Wednesday, July 17. However, it is not surprising: “a summer wave of Covid is hitting the country,” notes the Wall Street Journal.
For the week ending June 29, the latest date for which data is available, the COVID test positivity rate in the United States was 9%, an increase of 0.8% from the previous week, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). It’s also up from levels seen in early May.
Hospitalizations slightly up
Around thirty states are said to be particularly affected. Among the most affected: Arizona, California and Nevada, where the recorded positivity rates are approaching 16%. Covid is also proliferating in the south of the country. In Texas, for example, where 14% of tests carried out last week were positive. The Southeast and the states of Montana, Wyoming, Dakota, and Colorado, in the north of the country, remain the least affected to date, with a contamination rate lower than the national average.
While the weekly hospitalization rate remains relatively low, it has been increasing in recent weeks. While it was 0.3% in mid-May, it reached nearly 1.5% last week, according to data published by the CDC, which recommends going to the emergency room if you have difficulty breathing, an inability to stay awake, or persistent chest pain or pressure. However, the death rate is stabilizing: only 0.8% of deaths during the week of July 12 were linked to Covid-19.
An expected increase
But for Dr. William Schaffner, professor of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, nothing unusual. “We had anticipated that there would be some sort of summer surge because we’ve seen that in the past… COVID stays around in the summer and actually becomes a little bit more active, unlike the flu, which pretty much disappears in the summer,” he said. declared to ABC News“Now this surge should decrease, but of course we will have the conventional winter surge later,” he added.
Although Covid has not disappeared, we can nevertheless be happy that the risks of developing long Covid have decreased since the start of the pandemic. This is what a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine and cited by the Wall Street Journal. The researchers would have in fact established a correlation with the progression of vaccination coverage over the last two years. Thus, 70% of the decrease in the number of cases of long-term Covid would be due to vaccination, against only 30% to the evolution of the virus itself.