Cases: The daily number of COVID- 19 cases reported in Los Angeles County jumped again on Friday with more than 3,200 new infections logged, while health officials again warned of the disproportionate impact the pandemic has had on Black and Latino/a residents. The county reported 3,270 new infections on Friday, lifting the county’s overall total from throughout the pandemic to 2,888,408. Six more virusrelated fatalities were also reported, raising the death toll to 31,991.
According to state figures, there were 239 COVID- positive patients in Los Angeles County hospitals as of Friday, down from 244 on Thursday. Of those patients, 36 were being treated in intensive care, down from 37 a day earlier.
The average daily rate of people testing positive for the virus was 2.3% on Friday, roughly the same as Thursday.
The county Department of Public Health warned Friday that throughout the pandemic, Black and Latinx residents have faced a higher impact in terms of infections and deaths than white and Asian residents. Lower-income areas have also been more heavily affected. The discrepancies point to long-standing differences in level of care and access to care, officials said.
Health officials noted that during the four COVID- 19 surges the county has faced, Black and Brown residents have had case rates between two and four times higher than white residents. Hospitalization rates were three to four times higher during the recent winter surge, and death rates were two to three times higher in that same period.
Even COVID-19 vaccinations didn’t fully rectify discrepancies between wealthy and lower-income areas. According to the county, fully vaccinated residents in high-poverty areas were still twice as likely to get infected and wind up hospitalized than fully vaccinated residents in wealthier communities.
When the coronavirus was in retreat across the United States in late February, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued new recommendations that veered away from depending on the number of new cases in a community to determine the need for pandemic safety measures.
The focus shifted more toward the number of hospitalized people with the virus. Far more new cases than before would be required to push a community into the medium or high-risk categories.
The change turned most of the U.S. map green at a stroke. Until then, 95% of U.S. counties were considered high-risk, but afterward, fewer than one-third of Americans were living in places in that category, the agency said. The new guidelines gave millions of people confidence to remove their face masks and recommended that as long as the pressure on hospitals remained manageable, the country could return to some version of normal life.
That strategy will be put to the test in the next few weeks, because hospitalizations are rising again nationally. As of Thursday, an average of more than 18,000 people with the coronavirus are in U.S. hospitals, an increase of 20% from two weeks ago. The figure includes patients who are in the hospital because they are very ill with COVID-19, as well as those admitted for other reasons who test positive on arrival. More than half of American adults have at least one underlying chronic condition, and for many of them, the winter omicron wave was not as mild as it was for others. The recent influx has been even steeper in the largest high-risk area now on the national map, the hot spot that has spread across upstate
New York and spilled into nearby states. According to New York state, there were 2,119 patients hospitalized in the state with COVID-19 on Tuesday, 47% more than the figure from two weeks before.
The state’s figure is still well below the winter omicron peak of January, when about 13,000 people were hospitalized statewide. But it has been increasing, propelled by rapidly spreading BA.2 subvariants.
New Variants: (From the New York Times): South Africa is seeing signs of a fifth wave of the coronavirus as cases once again surge across the country. The recent spike is linked to two new subvariants that are part of the Omicron family: BA.4 and BA.5.
In the past week, cases have tripled, positivity rates have risen, and hospitalizations have increased. The surge, which is mainly concentrated in the Gauteng, Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal provinces, comes only a few months after South Africa’s initial Omicron wave last winter.
BA.4 and BA.5 are both offshoots of the original Omicron variant, which emerged sometime around November. In January, Omicron gave rise to a lineage of the virus with even more mutations, which included BA.4 and BA. 5. Here’s what we know so far:
Emerging data show that in unvaccinated people, BA.4 and BA.5 evade the natural defenses produced from an Omicron infection.
The two new subvariants spread more quickly than BA.2, which itself was more contagious than the original Omicron variant. Scientists are still studying whether this new wave creates more severe illness.
In the U.S., public health officials have identified BA.4 and BA.5 circulating at low levels. But another Omicron subvariant, BA.2, is currently dominant, and one more subvariant, BA.2.12.1, is gaining ground.
We also seem to be in a different pattern of evolution, Carl added. In 2021, we saw new variants that were markedly different from other forms of the virus. But now we’re experiencing evolutionary upgrades to viruses that remain in the Omicron family tree.
It’s difficult to predict what the surge in South Africa means for other countries. Local spikes can depend on a lot of factors, including local levels of immunity, virus restrictions and weather conditions.
Researchers estimate that about 90 percent of the population in South Africa has some immunity, in part from inoculation but largely because of previous infection. Yet immunity from infection typically begins to wane at around three months. It’s natural to see re-infection at that stage, particularly given people’s changing behaviors, like less mask-wearing and increased traveling, one expert said.
Deaths: Death Toll During Pandemic Far Exceeds Totals Reported by Countries, W.H.O. Says. Nearly 15 million more people died during the pandemic than would have in normal times, the World Health Organization said on Thursday, a staggering measure of Covid’s true toll that laid bare how vastly country after country has undercounted victims.
In Mexico, the excess death toll during the first two years of the pandemic was twice as high as the government’s official tally of Covid deaths, the W.H.O. found. In Egypt, excess deaths were roughly 12 times as great as the official Covid toll. In Pakistan, the figure was eight times as high.
Those estimates, calculated by a global panel of experts assembled by the W.H.O., represent what many scientists see as the most reliable gauge of the total impact of the pandemic. Faced with large gaps in global death data, the expert team set out to calculate excess mortality: the difference between the number of people who died in 2020 and 2021 and the number who would have been expected to die during that time if the pandemic had not happened.
Most of the excess deaths were victims of Covid itself, the experts said, but some died because the pandemic made it more difficult to get medical care for ailments such as heart attacks. The previous toll, based solely on death counts reported by countries, was six million.
Much of the loss of life from the pandemic was concentrated in 2021, when more contagious variants tore through even countries that had fended off earlier outbreaks. Overall deaths that year were roughly 18 percent higher — an extra 10 million people — than they would have been without the pandemic, the W.H.O.-assembled experts estimated. Developing nations bore the brunt of the devastation, with nearly eight million more people than expected dying in lower-middle-income nations during the pandemic.
The Economy: The U.S. economic rebound from the pandemic’s devastation held strong in April with another month of solid job growth. Employers added 428,000 jobs, matching the previous month, the Labor Department reported Friday, with the growth broad-based across every major industry.
The unemployment rate remained 3.6 percent, just a touch above its level before the pandemic, when it was the lowest in half a century.
The challenge of a highly competitive labor market for employers — a shortage of available workers — persisted as well. In fact, the report showed a decline of 363,000 in the labor force.
The economy has regained nearly 95 percent of the 22 million jobs lost at the height of coronavirus-related lockdowns two years ago. But the labor supply has not kept up with a record wave of job openings as businesses expand to match consumers’ continued willingness to buy a variety of goods and services. There are now 1.9 job openings for every unemployed worker.
The hiring scramble has driven up wages, and employers are largely passing on that expense, helping fuel inflation that Americans have cited as their leading economic concern. On that front, Friday’s report showed an easing in the acceleration of average hourly earnings, which increased 0.3 percent from the month before, after a 0.5 percent gain in March.
Record-low mortgages of less than 3% are long gone. Credit card rates likely will rise. So will the cost of an auto loan. Savers may finally receive a yield high enough to top inflation.
The substantial half-point hike in its benchmark short-term rate that the Federal Reserve announced Wednesday won’t, by itself, have much immediate effect on most Americans’ finances. But additional large hikes are expected to be announced at the Fed’s next two meetings, in June and July, and economists and investors foresee the fastest pace of rate increases since 1989.
The result could be much higher borrowing costs for households well into the future as the Fed fights the most painfully high inflation in four decades and ends a decadeslong era of historically low rates.
Chair Jerome Powell hopes that by making borrowing more expensive, the Fed will succeed in cooling demand for homes, cars and other goods and services and thereby slow inflation.
Yet the risks are high. With inflation likely to stay elevated, the Fed may have to drive borrowing costs even higher than it now expects. Doing so could tip the U.S. economy into recession.