The US government may be done with Covid, but recent data shows an alarming number of Americans are still dying from the respiratory disease
Nearly four years into the pandemic, hundreds of Americans are still dying every day from Covid, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The virus is responsible for around 1,000 deaths and 15,000 hospitalisations each week, CDC Director Mandy Cohen said during a media briefing on 2 December.
Death rates briefly dipped below 500 per week in July, the lowest rates since the pandemic began, before steadily increasing to as high as 1,400 in September.
The latest CDC data shows emergency doctor visits and hospitalisations spiked by 10 per cent over one week in mid-November, the first major increase in the virus’s spread for several months.
All of the vaccines so far target the spike protein, so looking for spike antibodies won’t tell you anything. If you test for nucleocapsid antibodies, however, and those show up, then you’ve definitely been infected. Even testing for N is not definitive, as very mild/asymptomatic cases may not develop an N response, and it does fade over time. I know there were studies to see if anti-RBD testing would work better, but I’m not sure what the results were.