Back to Normal? COVID Could Kill Another 200,000 If US Congress Doesn't Act

[beijingwalker]

Back to Normal? COVID Could Kill Another 200,000 If US Congress Doesn't Act​

BY FRED GUTERL
ON 04/06/22 AT 5:00 AM EDT

everywhere you look, people are coming out from under their pandemic rocks. The masks are off, the bars are crowded, the kids are back in school. Even New York City, home to some of the most stringent mandates, no longer requires proof of vaccination in restaurants or masks in schools. On April 7, the Red Sox and the Yankees will square off on Opening Day in front of a potential crowd of 50,000-plus fans eager to cheer full-throated and (mostly) maskless into the breeze.

Baseball fans aren't the only ones yearning to put the pandemic behind them. So, apparently, is Congress. New spending on testing, vaccines and therapeutics has been harder to find than Putin's conscience. Senator Mitt Romney led the charge to whittle White House requests from $30 billion down to $16 billion before settling this week on $10 billion, to be repurposed from unspent COVID-19 relief funds. "While we have supported historic, bipartisan measures in the United States Senate to provide unprecedented investments in vaccines, therapeutics, and testing," he wrote in a letter to President Joe Biden, "it is not yet clear why additional funding is needed." (Emphasis added.)

While Congress fiddles, SARS-CoV-2, the virus that has killed more than a million Americans and as many as 18 million people worldwide so far, according to one estimate, is still at large. Europe's relaxation of pandemic restrictions, together with a more contagious variant of Omicron, BA.2, has triggered a rise in cases and an uptick in the U.S. is expected over the next few weeks. It isn't expected to cause a rise in hospitalizations and deaths in the U.S., but that's not certain.

Beyond the variant du jour are more fraught questions: Does the coronavirus have more surprises in store in the months ahead? Will a new variant come along that evades the protection of vaccines and prior infections and sends this weary nation back into the pandemic doldrums? Scientists have no answers.

Last month, while Russia's invasion of Ukraine dominated the news, a committee of two dozen or so scientists, doctors and public health experts released a report that lays out possible scenarios for the next 12 months. If the coronavirus winds up staying mild and doesn't get much more contagious, deaths may be as low as 15,000 to 30,000. If we're unlucky, a deadly new variant that can evade immune protections could raise the death toll significantly—in this scenario, the group projects casualties of 100,000 to 300,000 lives in the next 12 months.

The wide range in casualties for the worst-case scenario roughly corresponds to how well the nation handles another outbreak, says Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota and a contributor to the report. The fate of 200,000 lives could hang on whether the U.S. has a well-funded plan in place, with enough tests, antiviral medications and vaccines for all, or succumbs to the politics of fatigue and pretends the pandemic is over.

"It's very clear that any investment we make right now in terms of improving our ability to respond to this virus will save us a lot later," says Osterholm. "The more we invest, the lower the number of deaths will be. There's no question about that."

Which way the virus goes—whether it fades away or returns with a vengeance—is uncertain. It's clear, though, that assuming the rosiest scenario without planning for the worst is foolhardy. That is especially true in light of our history with this coronavirus, which turned more deadly in the Delta surge last summer and more transmissible when Omicron hit in January. "Anyone who has any experience with infectious diseases would have to tell you, 'don't bet against this virus,'" says Osterholm.

The longer-term worry is that the nation will forget the miserable performance of its public health system in the last two traumatic years and acquiesce to the status quo. What's needed is a public health overhaul that brings the U.S. up to the level of other advanced nations. Such an overhaul would act as an insurance policy against not just the COVID-19 pandemic but against other biological threats as well—both infectious diseases that emerge from the wild and potential lab-made pathogens intended as weapons, a threat that has grown more likely in recent years by startling advances in low-cost methods of genetic manipulation.

The price tag of such an overhaul would be far steeper than the few billion dollars Congress and the White House have been fighting over. It would cost an initial outlay of $100 billion in public health infrastructure spending, according to the report, and then $20 billion or so a year to maintain readiness.

If $100 billion sounds like a lot of money, it's chicken feed compared to the cost of doing nothing.

Back to Normal? COVID Could Kill Another 200,000 If Congress Doesn't Act

What's needed is a $100-billion public-health overhaul to avoid the next catastrophe.

www.newsweek.com

 

[beijingwalker]

As U.S. nears 1 million COVID deaths, a county grapples with loss​

Mifflin County in Pennsylvania has one of the highest COVID-19 death rates among U.S. counties.
By Phil Galewitz, Kaiser Health News

Published Apr. 5
McVEYTOWN, Pa. — Connie Houtz didn’t think COVID-19 would be that bad.

She’d seen many people in this rural hamlet in central Pennsylvania get infected yet recover within a few days. She did not get vaccinated because she worried about how a new vaccine, developed in record time, might affect her heart condition.

Last October, her youngest son, 45-year-old Eric Delamarter, developed a chest cold. He put off going to the doctor because he had customers waiting at his shop where he repaired cars, she said. When he finally went to the emergency room at Geisinger Lewistown Hospital, he was diagnosed with pneumonia and COVID-19.

Within a few days, Houtz’s oldest son, 50-year-old Toby Delamarter, had also been admitted to the hospital with the virus and shortness of breath.

Less than two weeks later, both of her sons were dead. Neither had been vaccinated.

“Even though it does not seem fair and does not seem right, down the road we will find a reason for why things happen,” said Houtz, 71, as she sat at her kitchen table.

Eric and Toby Delamarter are two of the roughly 300 people who have died of COVID-19 in Mifflin County, where cows grazing in pastures and Amish horse and buggies are frequent sights. The county 60 miles northwest of Harrisburg leans heavily Republican — 77 percent of votes cast in 2020 were for Donald Trump — and the former president’s downplaying of COVID-19 found fertile ground there.

Mifflin has one of the highest COVID-19 death rates among U.S. counties with at least 40,000 people, according to government data compiled by Johns Hopkins University — 591 deaths per 100,000 residents as of mid-March, compared with 298 deaths nationally.

The United States is nearing 1 million deaths from COVID-19 — a number that few thought possible when the pandemic began.

In March 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that based on modeling of the pace of the coronavirus’s spread in the U.S. at that time, “between 100,000 and 200,000″ people may die from COVID-19.

Reaching a million deaths seemed even more improbable when safe and effective vaccines came onto the market in December 2020. More than 60 percent of the 977,000 deaths have occurred since then.

Mifflin County offers a snapshot into how one hard-hit community moved from skepticism about the scientific reality of the COVID-19 virus, and then about the vaccine, to coping with unbearable loss and processing the trauma. Roughly 8 in 10 deaths nationwide from April to December 2021 were among the unvaccinated, according to the latest analysis of data from 23 states and New York City and Seattle by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Mifflin County Coroner Daniel Lynch isn’t over the stress of COVID-19 even as deaths have declined this year. As of mid-March, his office had counted 337 COVID-19 deaths in the county — about 60 more than the official tally kept by the state. That’s because the coroner counts anyone who dies in the county, including those who lived in other counties. Among the people in the coroner’s count, 311 hadn’t received even one COVID-19 shot. Few residents wore masks even when cases were high nationally and locally.

“It was pure hell,” Lynch said. “I have been a coroner since 1996 and never got calls from nurses reporting deaths crying on the phone or facilities reporting two or three deaths at one time.”

In Lewistown, the county seat, finding people who knew some of the dead is easy.

At the Corner Lunchbox on a recent afternoon, hands of all five employees and customers quickly shot up when asked whether they knew anyone killed by COVID-19. Sheila Saurbeck, 65, a manager, said she had lost two friends. And she had COVID-19 herself last year, recovering after a couple of weeks.

Behind the counter was owner Lorrie Sirgey, 56. She said she was hospitalized with COVID-19 for four days last spring before she got vaccinated. “It’s been a scary time,” she said.

As elsewhere in the country, Mifflin County has seen COVID-19 cases fall dramatically since January. It’s unusual to see anyone wearing masks. Health experts point to several factors behind Mifflin County’s high death rate:

• A large older population — 22 percent of residents are 65 or older.
• A low COVID-19 vaccination rate (51 percent of residents are fully vaccinated, compared with 63 percent statewide).
• The prominent Amish and Mennonite populations; Amish people make up over 8 percent of county residents. Members of those communities largely did not get vaccinated and often gathered for large weddings and funerals during the past two years, according to county officials. Amish, in particular, have low rates of vaccination because they are leery of government intervention and rely on family traditions for preventive medicine.

Mifflin County Commissioner Kevin Kodish also blames politics.

“We are very rural here,” he said. “It’s heavy Republican and heavy in Trump support, so in the beginning people were skeptical of COVID-19 because he downplayed the disease. And I think that carried over with skepticism with vaccines.”

Having so many deaths in the county of about 45,000 people is difficult to comprehend, he added. His 94-year-old mother, who was living in a nursing home, died last year not long after her own bout with COVID-19.

Kodish, the only Democrat on the three-member County Commission, said COVID-19 split the community, between people who took the disease seriously and got vaccinated, practiced physical distancing, and wore masks and others who just wanted to live their regular lives.

Although COVID-19 has been devastating to many families, the Republican mayor of Lewistown, Deborah Bargo, acknowledged the death toll but focused on how her town’s economy is improving.

“It’s been hard for those who have lost loved ones, and that pain never goes away,” said Bargo, who has been mayor for 15 years. “But, economically, we’ve bounced back.”

Bargo pointed out that nearly every storefront in the downtown square is occupied, a century-old theater is being restored, and a young Mennonite entrepreneur has recently opened a cafe-bakery.

She said she is worried that many older people who stayed in their homes because of fears about COVID-19 have been forever changed by the isolation. In her church, she said, people who wear masks still sit away from everyone else.

Noah Wise, 59, a road supervisor in Burnham, just north of Lewistown, said he’s not coping well. His wife, Lisa, a nurse at Geisinger’s outpatient care department, died of COVID-19 in December. She was 58 and not vaccinated because she was worried how the vaccine would affect a chronic health condition — even though health experts say people with chronic health issues are more likely to suffer severe consequences and death from COVID-19.

Wise said Lisa likely caught the virus from him after he was infected in October. “She had no regrets about not being vaccinated,” Wise said. “She thought she would pull through.”

His wife’s death has not persuaded him to get vaccinated because he believes his earlier infection has given him immunity. Natural immunity does confer some resistance to catching the disease but is highly variable in strength, so health experts urge those who have been infected to get vaccinated.

Jenny Barron Landis, executive director of the Juniata River Valley Visitors Bureau, which covers Mifflin County, said many community members were not interested in taking orders from government scientists. “We have a lot of independent farmers and business owners that didn’t agree with or honor the mandates, and that has played a big role here in the number of deaths and the number of cases,” she said.

Against that backdrop, Geoff Burke, a local funeral director, recalled weeks when his Lewistown funeral home would handle up to 17 deaths, many of them from COVID-19 — triple its average. “We were overwhelmed,” he said. “COVID just ravaged our town as it went from nursing home to nursing home.”

On March 15, Geisinger Lewistown, a 133-bed hospital, had just two COVID-19 patients, down from 50 earlier this winter, said Dr. Michael Hegstrom, chief medical officer for the region of Geisinger that includes Mifflin County. Geisinger refused to disclose what percentage of its employees at the Lewistown hospital have been vaccinated for COVID-19. It would say only that all its employees are either vaccinated or received an exemption. Geisinger also refused to disclose how many of its employees in Lewistown died of COVID-19.

Yet the hospital is still being affected by the virus. It is running above capacity because of high numbers of patients with medical issues such as heart disease and cancer who put off care during the pandemic, Hegstrom said.

Connie Houtz said that the deaths of Eric and Toby — two of her three children — had been hard but that she was thankful for family and friends and strong faith. She remembers Toby — who had some health problems, including cancer of the small intestine a few years ago — as “easygoing and a big teddy bear.” Eric, who had high blood pressure, loved spending time with his daughter and taking the teenager fishing, Houtz said.

Both brothers rode Harley-Davidson motorcycles and would hang out with friends at a bar near her house. “It still hits you at times that they are really gone,” she said.

As U.S. nears 1 million COVID deaths, a county grapples with loss

Mifflin County in Pennsylvania has one of the highest COVID-19 death rates among U.S. counties.

www.tampabay.com

 

[mili]

As U.S. nears 1 million COVID deaths, a county grapples with loss​

Mifflin County in Pennsylvania has one of the highest COVID-19 death rates among U.S. counties.
By Phil Galewitz, Kaiser Health News

Published Apr. 5
McVEYTOWN, Pa. — Connie Houtz didn’t think COVID-19 would be that bad.

She’d seen many people in this rural hamlet in central Pennsylvania get infected yet recover within a few days. She did not get vaccinated because she worried about how a new vaccine, developed in record time, might affect her heart condition.

Last October, her youngest son, 45-year-old Eric Delamarter, developed a chest cold. He put off going to the doctor because he had customers waiting at his shop where he repaired cars, she said. When he finally went to the emergency room at Geisinger Lewistown Hospital, he was diagnosed with pneumonia and COVID-19.

Within a few days, Houtz’s oldest son, 50-year-old Toby Delamarter, had also been admitted to the hospital with the virus and shortness of breath.

Less than two weeks later, both of her sons were dead. Neither had been vaccinated.

“Even though it does not seem fair and does not seem right, down the road we will find a reason for why things happen,” said Houtz, 71, as she sat at her kitchen table.

Eric and Toby Delamarter are two of the roughly 300 people who have died of COVID-19 in Mifflin County, where cows grazing in pastures and Amish horse and buggies are frequent sights. The county 60 miles northwest of Harrisburg leans heavily Republican — 77 percent of votes cast in 2020 were for Donald Trump — and the former president’s downplaying of COVID-19 found fertile ground there.

Mifflin has one of the highest COVID-19 death rates among U.S. counties with at least 40,000 people, according to government data compiled by Johns Hopkins University — 591 deaths per 100,000 residents as of mid-March, compared with 298 deaths nationally.

The United States is nearing 1 million deaths from COVID-19 — a number that few thought possible when the pandemic began.

In March 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that based on modeling of the pace of the coronavirus’s spread in the U.S. at that time, “between 100,000 and 200,000″ people may die from COVID-19.

Reaching a million deaths seemed even more improbable when safe and effective vaccines came onto the market in December 2020. More than 60 percent of the 977,000 deaths have occurred since then.

Mifflin County offers a snapshot into how one hard-hit community moved from skepticism about the scientific reality of the COVID-19 virus, and then about the vaccine, to coping with unbearable loss and processing the trauma. Roughly 8 in 10 deaths nationwide from April to December 2021 were among the unvaccinated, according to the latest analysis of data from 23 states and New York City and Seattle by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Mifflin County Coroner Daniel Lynch isn’t over the stress of COVID-19 even as deaths have declined this year. As of mid-March, his office had counted 337 COVID-19 deaths in the county — about 60 more than the official tally kept by the state. That’s because the coroner counts anyone who dies in the county, including those who lived in other counties. Among the people in the coroner’s count, 311 hadn’t received even one COVID-19 shot. Few residents wore masks even when cases were high nationally and locally.

“It was pure hell,” Lynch said. “I have been a coroner since 1996 and never got calls from nurses reporting deaths crying on the phone or facilities reporting two or three deaths at one time.”

In Lewistown, the county seat, finding people who knew some of the dead is easy.

At the Corner Lunchbox on a recent afternoon, hands of all five employees and customers quickly shot up when asked whether they knew anyone killed by COVID-19. Sheila Saurbeck, 65, a manager, said she had lost two friends. And she had COVID-19 herself last year, recovering after a couple of weeks.

Behind the counter was owner Lorrie Sirgey, 56. She said she was hospitalized with COVID-19 for four days last spring before she got vaccinated. “It’s been a scary time,” she said.

As elsewhere in the country, Mifflin County has seen COVID-19 cases fall dramatically since January. It’s unusual to see anyone wearing masks. Health experts point to several factors behind Mifflin County’s high death rate:

• A large older population — 22 percent of residents are 65 or older.
• A low COVID-19 vaccination rate (51 percent of residents are fully vaccinated, compared with 63 percent statewide).
• The prominent Amish and Mennonite populations; Amish people make up over 8 percent of county residents. Members of those communities largely did not get vaccinated and often gathered for large weddings and funerals during the past two years, according to county officials. Amish, in particular, have low rates of vaccination because they are leery of government intervention and rely on family traditions for preventive medicine.

Mifflin County Commissioner Kevin Kodish also blames politics.

“We are very rural here,” he said. “It’s heavy Republican and heavy in Trump support, so in the beginning people were skeptical of COVID-19 because he downplayed the disease. And I think that carried over with skepticism with vaccines.”

Having so many deaths in the county of about 45,000 people is difficult to comprehend, he added. His 94-year-old mother, who was living in a nursing home, died last year not long after her own bout with COVID-19.

Kodish, the only Democrat on the three-member County Commission, said COVID-19 split the community, between people who took the disease seriously and got vaccinated, practiced physical distancing, and wore masks and others who just wanted to live their regular lives.

Although COVID-19 has been devastating to many families, the Republican mayor of Lewistown, Deborah Bargo, acknowledged the death toll but focused on how her town’s economy is improving.

“It’s been hard for those who have lost loved ones, and that pain never goes away,” said Bargo, who has been mayor for 15 years. “But, economically, we’ve bounced back.”

Bargo pointed out that nearly every storefront in the downtown square is occupied, a century-old theater is being restored, and a young Mennonite entrepreneur has recently opened a cafe-bakery.

She said she is worried that many older people who stayed in their homes because of fears about COVID-19 have been forever changed by the isolation. In her church, she said, people who wear masks still sit away from everyone else.

Noah Wise, 59, a road supervisor in Burnham, just north of Lewistown, said he’s not coping well. His wife, Lisa, a nurse at Geisinger’s outpatient care department, died of COVID-19 in December. She was 58 and not vaccinated because she was worried how the vaccine would affect a chronic health condition — even though health experts say people with chronic health issues are more likely to suffer severe consequences and death from COVID-19.

Wise said Lisa likely caught the virus from him after he was infected in October. “She had no regrets about not being vaccinated,” Wise said. “She thought she would pull through.”

His wife’s death has not persuaded him to get vaccinated because he believes his earlier infection has given him immunity. Natural immunity does confer some resistance to catching the disease but is highly variable in strength, so health experts urge those who have been infected to get vaccinated.

Jenny Barron Landis, executive director of the Juniata River Valley Visitors Bureau, which covers Mifflin County, said many community members were not interested in taking orders from government scientists. “We have a lot of independent farmers and business owners that didn’t agree with or honor the mandates, and that has played a big role here in the number of deaths and the number of cases,” she said.

Against that backdrop, Geoff Burke, a local funeral director, recalled weeks when his Lewistown funeral home would handle up to 17 deaths, many of them from COVID-19 — triple its average. “We were overwhelmed,” he said. “COVID just ravaged our town as it went from nursing home to nursing home.”

On March 15, Geisinger Lewistown, a 133-bed hospital, had just two COVID-19 patients, down from 50 earlier this winter, said Dr. Michael Hegstrom, chief medical officer for the region of Geisinger that includes Mifflin County. Geisinger refused to disclose what percentage of its employees at the Lewistown hospital have been vaccinated for COVID-19. It would say only that all its employees are either vaccinated or received an exemption. Geisinger also refused to disclose how many of its employees in Lewistown died of COVID-19.

Yet the hospital is still being affected by the virus. It is running above capacity because of high numbers of patients with medical issues such as heart disease and cancer who put off care during the pandemic, Hegstrom said.

Connie Houtz said that the deaths of Eric and Toby — two of her three children — had been hard but that she was thankful for family and friends and strong faith. She remembers Toby — who had some health problems, including cancer of the small intestine a few years ago — as “easygoing and a big teddy bear.” Eric, who had high blood pressure, loved spending time with his daughter and taking the teenager fishing, Houtz said.

Both brothers rode Harley-Davidson motorcycles and would hang out with friends at a bar near her house. “It still hits you at times that they are really gone,” she said.

As U.S. nears 1 million COVID deaths, a county grapples with loss

Mifflin County in Pennsylvania has one of the highest COVID-19 death rates among U.S. counties.

www.tampabay.com

They were already near 1 mil a yr ago.

New Study Estimates More Than 900,000 People Have Died Of COVID-19 In U.S.​

May 6, 202112:58 PM ET
.....................................

New Study Estimates More Than 900,000 People Have Died Of COVID-19 In U.S.

The total, estimated by researchers at the University of Washington, is 57% higher than the official death toll. Worldwide, they said, COVID-19 deaths are nearing 7 million, twice the official total.

www.npr.org

 

[Wergeland]

Hopefully Trump come back into power and Makes America Great Again

 

[Bengal71]

Hopefully Trump come back into power and Makes America Great Again

He will come back, that's a given.

 

[-=virus=-]

its dead, stick a fork in it.

good riddance, China virus.

 

[Han Patriot]

its dead, stick a fork in it.

good riddance, China virus.

105k infected 3 days ago in US and 1900 dead. You think the virus won't mutate?

 

[Han Patriot]

I

Back to Normal? COVID Could Kill Another 200,000 If US Congress Doesn't Act​

BY FRED GUTERL
ON 04/06/22 AT 5:00 AM EDT

everywhere you look, people are coming out from under their pandemic rocks. The masks are off, the bars are crowded, the kids are back in school. Even New York City, home to some of the most stringent mandates, no longer requires proof of vaccination in restaurants or masks in schools. On April 7, the Red Sox and the Yankees will square off on Opening Day in front of a potential crowd of 50,000-plus fans eager to cheer full-throated and (mostly) maskless into the breeze.

Baseball fans aren't the only ones yearning to put the pandemic behind them. So, apparently, is Congress. New spending on testing, vaccines and therapeutics has been harder to find than Putin's conscience. Senator Mitt Romney led the charge to whittle White House requests from $30 billion down to $16 billion before settling this week on $10 billion, to be repurposed from unspent COVID-19 relief funds. "While we have supported historic, bipartisan measures in the United States Senate to provide unprecedented investments in vaccines, therapeutics, and testing," he wrote in a letter to President Joe Biden, "it is not yet clear why additional funding is needed." (Emphasis added.)

While Congress fiddles, SARS-CoV-2, the virus that has killed more than a million Americans and as many as 18 million people worldwide so far, according to one estimate, is still at large. Europe's relaxation of pandemic restrictions, together with a more contagious variant of Omicron, BA.2, has triggered a rise in cases and an uptick in the U.S. is expected over the next few weeks. It isn't expected to cause a rise in hospitalizations and deaths in the U.S., but that's not certain.

Beyond the variant du jour are more fraught questions: Does the coronavirus have more surprises in store in the months ahead? Will a new variant come along that evades the protection of vaccines and prior infections and sends this weary nation back into the pandemic doldrums? Scientists have no answers.

Last month, while Russia's invasion of Ukraine dominated the news, a committee of two dozen or so scientists, doctors and public health experts released a report that lays out possible scenarios for the next 12 months. If the coronavirus winds up staying mild and doesn't get much more contagious, deaths may be as low as 15,000 to 30,000. If we're unlucky, a deadly new variant that can evade immune protections could raise the death toll significantly—in this scenario, the group projects casualties of 100,000 to 300,000 lives in the next 12 months.

The wide range in casualties for the worst-case scenario roughly corresponds to how well the nation handles another outbreak, says Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota and a contributor to the report. The fate of 200,000 lives could hang on whether the U.S. has a well-funded plan in place, with enough tests, antiviral medications and vaccines for all, or succumbs to the politics of fatigue and pretends the pandemic is over.

"It's very clear that any investment we make right now in terms of improving our ability to respond to this virus will save us a lot later," says Osterholm. "The more we invest, the lower the number of deaths will be. There's no question about that."

Which way the virus goes—whether it fades away or returns with a vengeance—is uncertain. It's clear, though, that assuming the rosiest scenario without planning for the worst is foolhardy. That is especially true in light of our history with this coronavirus, which turned more deadly in the Delta surge last summer and more transmissible when Omicron hit in January. "Anyone who has any experience with infectious diseases would have to tell you, 'don't bet against this virus,'" says Osterholm.

The longer-term worry is that the nation will forget the miserable performance of its public health system in the last two traumatic years and acquiesce to the status quo. What's needed is a public health overhaul that brings the U.S. up to the level of other advanced nations. Such an overhaul would act as an insurance policy against not just the COVID-19 pandemic but against other biological threats as well—both infectious diseases that emerge from the wild and potential lab-made pathogens intended as weapons, a threat that has grown more likely in recent years by startling advances in low-cost methods of genetic manipulation.

The price tag of such an overhaul would be far steeper than the few billion dollars Congress and the White House have been fighting over. It would cost an initial outlay of $100 billion in public health infrastructure spending, according to the report, and then $20 billion or so a year to maintain readiness.

If $100 billion sounds like a lot of money, it's chicken feed compared to the cost of doing nothing.

Back to Normal? COVID Could Kill Another 200,000 If Congress Doesn't Act

What's needed is a $100-billion public-health overhaul to avoid the next catastrophe.

www.newsweek.com

I just realised this maybe true and highly feasible 200k dead by end of the year.

Current infected in US today is 100k and 300 dead. Assuming a 0.3% death even with vaccination. If the virus spreads around with current variant, US modelling points to 100mil infected, 0.3% x 100mil is 300'000, this does not take into account waning immunity and assuming only current variant and not a deadlier variant. I will bet today that US will see minimum 200k dead by 31st Dec 2022.

 

[Falconless]

Pakistan never closed, learn from us China.

 

[Han Patriot]

Pakistan never closed, learn from us China.

I actually agree on living with covid, 1% dead is not a problem for me. It's just the Chinese government cares too much for human life, ironic isn't it.

Pakistan never closed, learn from us China.

I actually agree on living with covid, 1% dead is not a problem for me. It's just the Chinese government cares too much for human life, ironic isn't it.

 

[etylo]

its dead, stick a fork in it.

good riddance, China virus.

Its the India Delta virus that have ruined the world indeed, whitemen's lackeys Indians.

 

[mili]

Maybe what they try to say is 200k extra deaths per yr is the new normal for usa.