Even if death rates stay low in the near term, that doesn’t mean the risk of Covid-19 has evaporated. Thousands of Americans being hospitalized in the past few weeks with a disease that makes it hard to breathe is not a time to declare victory. Young people, who account for a bigger share of the recent cases, aren’t at nearly as high a risk of dying from the virus, but some small number of them will still die and a larger number will end up in the hospital. Early research also suggests that people infected with the coronavirus experience lung damage and other long-term complications that could lead to health problems down the road, even if they don’t experience particularly bad symptoms during their illness.
And as long as the virus is spreading in the community, there is an increased risk that it will find its way to the more vulnerable populations.
“More infected people means faster spread throughout society,” Kumi Smith, who studies infectious diseases at the University of Minnesota, told me. “And the more this virus spreads the more likely it is to eventually reach and infect someone who may die or be severely harmed by it.”
This presents a communications challenge. Sadly, as Smith put it, “please abstain from things you like to benefit others in ways that you may not be able to see or feel” is not an easy message for people to accept after three-plus months in relative isolation.
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Why Covid-19 deaths aren’t rising along with cases — yet
The contradiction between these two curves — case numbers sloping upward, death counts downward — is the primary reason some people are agitating to accelerate, not slow down, reopening in the face of these new coronavirus spikes.
The most important thing to understand is that this is actually to be expected. There is a long lag — as long as six weeks, experts told me — between when a person gets infected and when their death would be reported in the official tally.
“Why aren’t today’s deaths trending in the same way today’s cases are trending? That’s completely not the way to think about it,” Eleanor Murray, an epidemiologist at Boston University, told me. “Today’s cases represent infections that probably happened a week or two ago. Today’s deaths represent cases that were diagnosed possibly up to a month ago, so infections that were up to six weeks ago or more.”
“Some people do get infected and die quickly, but the majority of people who die, it takes a while,” Murray continued. “It’s not a matter of a one-week lag between cases and deaths. We expect something more on the order of a four-, five-, six-week lag.”
As Whet Moser wrote for the Covid Tracking Project last week, the recent spikes in case counts really took off around June 18 and 19. So we would not expect them to show up in the death data yet.
“Hospitalizations and deaths are both lagging indicators, because it takes time to progress through the course of illness,” Caitlin Rivers at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security told me late last week. “The recent surge started around two weeks ago, so it’s too soon to be confident that we won’t see an uptick in hospitalizations and deaths.”
The national numbers can also obscure local trends. According to the Covid Tracking Project, hospitalizations are spiking in the South and West, but, at the same time, they are dropping precipitously in the Northeast, the initial epicenter of the US outbreak.