President Biden is 79 years old, and Americans his age and older make up a bigger and bigger share of the Covid death toll in recent months. The virus has taken advantage of the decline in immunity caused by the long delay since the last vaccination of older people, and the Omicron variant has developed an increased ability to undermine the body’s defences.
Covid is killing significantly fewer Americans of all ages this summer than it did during the peak of the winter’s Omicron wave. Nevertheless, older people remain at significantly higher risk.
According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in early June, four times more people aged 75 to 84 were dying from the virus each week, compared to those under two decades old. (Those death numbers are provisional, the CDC warned, because they were based on death certificates and did not account for all deaths in those age groups.)
That’s an even bigger difference than the age at the peak of the Omicron wave this winter. Then, the number of people in the age group of 75 to 84 killed by Covid each week was twice the number of people in the age group 55 to 64.
The president received a second booster shot in late March, which significantly reduced the risk of serious illness. The CDC has reported that this spring, people age 50 and older who received a single booster were dying from Covid at four times the rate of people who got two booster doses.
In 2022, COVID deaths, although always concentrated among older people, were more skewed than older people at any point since vaccines became widely available. Many older people were vaccinated in early 2021, and among those who have not yet received a booster shot, the immune protection posed by the shots has been significantly reduced.
In contrast, middle-aged Americans, who suffered a substantial portion of pandemic deaths last summer and fall, are benefiting from greater reserves of immune protection from both vaccination and prior infection.
According to the latest CDC data, while Covid deaths remain much lower than in winter, they are climbing again among older people as the immune-disrupting omicron subvariant known as ba.5 causes more infections. . From the beginning of May to the beginning of June, the number of Americans aged 75 to 84 who died from Covid each week increased by nearly 50 percent.
(This story has not been edited by seemayo staff and is published from a rss feed)