In the USA, Covid-19 is currently the leading cause of death. 3,744 victims of the pandemic were registered nationwide on Friday. For eight months, the Covid-19 death rate was the third largest cause of death in the United States after heart disease and cancer – after heart disease and cancer, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) reported. The situation is currently spiraling out of control in regions like Southern California.
Every eight minutes someone dies
“Los Angeles – The situation is dire. Every ten minutes someone tests positive for Covid-19. Every eight minutes someone dies. Ambulances drive in circles for hours and cannot find an emergency room that can still take patients. The hospitals are running out of oxygen. The free capacity of the intensive care units is zero. Patients lie in the corridors and in tents, ”wrote the US pharmaceutical and medical news portal STAT on Saturday. The National Guard was mobilized not to help patients, but to remove the bodies of the deceased.
LA anders in NY
Southern California with the Los Angeles metropolitan area and around ten million inhabitants (LA County) apparently survived the first flare-up of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic last spring. But the situation is different now. “In New York, people got very frightened and behaved right. We got off well, people relaxed and stopped adhering to (hygiene / distance) measures, ”said Karin Michels, director of epidemiology at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).
Metropolitan areas and poverty
According to US experts, metropolitan areas and poverty are the driving forces behind development. In and around Los Angeles, with the largest proportion of people with a Latin American background, the Covid-19 death rate would have increased eight-fold within a few months.
The situation in California basically represents the nationwide situation in the United States. “The daily number of deaths from Covid-19 is similar to that of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack that killed 2,988 people. Or they resemble the daily crash of 15 Airbus 320 passenger planes, each with 150 people on board, ”wrote Steven Woolf (Center for Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University) and two co-authors in JAMA.
241,000 new cases in one day
The numbers are currently much worse: On Friday (January 15), 240,925 new cases of SARS-CoV-2 infections were registered in the USA – an increase of 19 percent within 14 days. There were 3,744 Covid-19 deaths that day (up 32 percent compared to two weeks ago). 23.6 million cases of the infection are compared to nearly 393,000 deaths in the United States.
Eight months in third place
According to the experts, Covid-19 is already in third place of all causes of death for the total population of the USA if one takes into account the period from March to October 2020 (eight months): 698 died from the consequences of a SARS-CoV-2 infection during this period , 8 people per million population. This mortality rate was the third highest after that from heart disease with 1,287.7 deaths per million inhabitants and that from cancer (1,219.8 / million inhabitants). For comparison: the mortality rate from chronic lung diseases (COPD) was 307.5 per million people, and that from traffic accidents was 89.2 per million people.
Death rate tripled
That runs through all age groups. Among those over 85, the Covid-19 death rate between March and October 2020 was 10,699.7 per million people. That was already the second highest value after that for heart disease (24,530.2 per million) and even before cancer (10,442.4 / million).
However, this does not adequately represent the current situation. Between the beginning of November 2020 and December 13 of last year, the number of Covid 19 deaths had tripled from around 800 to around 2,400 a day. For decades, there would have been about 1,700 deaths per day in the U.S. from heart disease and about 1,600 from cancer, wrote Woolf and his co-authors. “With Covid-19 mortality, which exceeds these thresholds, this infectious disease has become more deadly than heart disease and cancer (…).” However, one also has to add all deaths that occurred as an indirect consequence of the pandemic.
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