The U.S. COVID-19 death toll has hit 900,000 amid the Omicron variant's continued spread within the nation and the recent discovery of its subvariant.
Officials around the world are still struggling to contain the rising number of infections driven by the Omicron coronavirus variant. However, dozens of countries have already reported detection of a new subvariant.
COVID-19 Deaths Top 900,000 in the US
In November, South African authorities were the first to report the existence of the Omicron variant. Since then, the new strain has replaced the Delta variant as the dominant driver of infections in most countries.
The vast majority of confirmed new COVID-19 infections in the world are attributed to the dominant form of Omicron, which is known as BA.1. However, a subvariant, known as BA.2, is making its rounds and has started to compete in terms of transmissibility.
Leading scientists worldwide continue their investigations of the new subvariant amid early studies that show it could be more transmissible than the original variant. Various countries, including Denmark, India, and Nepal, are closely monitoring the situation due to the strain dominating infections, as per Aljazeera.
The subvariant comes as the U.S. has recorded an increase of 100,000 COVID-19 deaths, rising to 900,000 as of Friday compared to 800,000 from less than two months ago. Johns Hopkins University is the one that compiled the data and shows the total over the two years of the pandemic, giving a death toll higher than the population of Indianapolis, San Francisco, or Charlotte, North Carolina.
The horrifying milestone after more than a year of vaccination efforts that have been stifled by misinformation and political and legal controversies. The hesitancy to the treatments comes despite medical professionals arguing that vaccines are safe and highly effective at preventing serious illness and even death.
Spread of Omicron Variant
The Associated Press reported that the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, Dr. Ashish K. Jha, said that the new number was "astronomically high." He said that many people would not have believed if they were told at the beginning of the pandemic that nearly one million Americans were going to die due to the virus.
However, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said that the threat of the coronavirus was much higher than the data suggests. Officials argued that the number of fatalities due to COVID-19 in the United States was roughly 32% higher than reported between February 2020 and September 2021.
Johns Hopkins revealed that there have been more than 2,000 new confirmed infections reported every day in the U.S. for the past two weeks. Officials noted that more than a third of all reported COVID-19 deaths occurred last winter between November 2020 and February 2021.
The situation comes as unvaccinated adults have a 97 times greater risk of dying from the coronavirus compared to adults who are fully vaccinated and have received their booster shots. Older people are at much greater risk than other age groups as 76% of COVID-19 deaths since the beginning of the health crisis have been individuals 65 years or older, CNN reported.
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