World marks 500,000 covid deaths since omicron, while Fauci says US is exiting full blown pandemic

While half a million people around the world have died of covid-19 since the omicron variant of the coronavirus was first detected in November, President Biden’s top medical adviser says the United States is exiting “the full-blown pandemic phase” of the coronavirus crisis.

© Scott Olson/Getty Images Respiratory Therapist Nirali Patel works with a covid-19 patient in the ICU at Rush University Medial Center on Jan. 31 in Chicago.

It’s a sobering statistic — and a reminder of the pandemic’s ongoing toll even as cases start to decline in nearly every U.S. state.

About 100,000 of the deaths since omicron was declared a “variant of concern” occurred in the United States, the World Health Organization said Tuesday. WHO incident manager Abdi Mahamud said in an online Q&A session said the death toll is “tragic” given the availability of “effective vaccines.” He said there have been 130 million reported cases of the coronavirus globally since omicron.

Anthony S. Fauci told the Financial Times that decisions on coronavirus restrictions in the United States will be increasingly made on a local level, “as we get out of the full-blown pandemic phase of covid-19, which we are certainly heading out of.”

“There will also be more people making their own decisions on how they want to deal with the virus,” he told the newspaper.

In the United States, covid cases declined 44 percent in the past week compared to the previous seven days, according to a Washington Post tracker, and hospitalizations related to covid-19 also declined over the same period.

However, the seven-day average of deaths during the omicron surge has reached 2,600 in recent days, the highest level the country has seen in a year.

During the Q&A, Mahamud noted that in the 24 hours ending Tuesday afternoon, 3,400 people had died of covid-19 in the United States and lamented the impact of vaccine hesitancy there.

He said those who focus solely on omicron causing milder infections than previous variants “miss the point,” because transmission is still high and many countries have not hit the peak of omicron.

Worldwide, coronavirus deaths rose for the fifth consecutive week, with the 68,000 fatalities reported last week representing a 7 percent jump from the previous week.

Last week, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a news briefing that covid deaths are increasing in many parts of the world and warned it would be “premature for any country either to surrender, or to declare victory” against the coronavirus.

“We’re concerned that a narrative has taken hold in some countries that because of vaccines, and because of omicron’s high transmissibility and lower severity, preventing transmission is no longer possible, and no longer necessary,” he said. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”