- by New Deal democrat
Covd-19 has now been with us for over five years. The first reliable statistics started to be kept at the end of March 2020. On Friday the CDC issued the final update for deaths ending the week of March 29, 2025, which means we now have five full years of documentation. So this is a good time to take a look back, and to update where we stand.
To cut to the chase, it appears the original Omicron variant was a watershed. All variants that have come and gone since then have been descended from that one.Between widespread, probably near universal infections from that line over the past three years, and vaccinations targeted at that variant line, it very much looks like the virus is now facing a wall of resistance.
Here is the CDC’s wastewater particle graph. This graph started at the time Omicron was rampant, so it only covers the last 3+ years:
You can see that Covid particles in wastewater have never gotten close to their Omicron levels, and there has been a general decline over the past year.
Even more significant is what has happened to deaths. Here is the full five year long weekly chart of deaths:
Basically, there was an awful first two years, followed by a sharp and continuing decline thereafter.
Here is the same chart, but just for the last three years (note difference in scale):
Even confined to just this time period, the pattern of ever decreasing fatalities is clear.
Not only have deaths declined, but they have declined by far more than can be explained simply by the prevalence of the virus in circulation. Below I show particles per milliliter for each significant peak beginning with Omicron (1st column), deaths in thousands (second column), and number of fatalities per virus particle (3rd column):
12/21 24.6. 21.3. 866
6/22. 10.5. 3.4. 324
12/22. 11.3. 3.9. 345
12/23. 14.0. 2.6. 186
6/24. 9.0. 1.4. 156
12/24. 5.5. 1.0. 182
On a per particle basis, lethality declined by more than half in 2022, and then by about another half from the end of 2023 on. This is due to a combination of better treatments for the disease, more and repeated vaccinations, and nearly universal exposure with resulting varying levels of resistance.
To drive the point home, here is the number of deaths for each 52 week period beginning April 1 of each of the past five years:
4/1/20-3/31/21 504,000
4/1/21-3/31/22 433,000
4/1/22-3/31/23 128,000
4/1/23-3/31/24 64,500
4/1/24-3/31/25 36,400.
One year ago I closed this update with the following:
“Finally, how does this compare with the flu? Well, the typical flue season gives rise to about 35,000 deaths +/-10,000. So even at 64,000 COVID is presently the equivalent of a very bad flu season. If the trends of the past several years continue, then in 1 or 2 years we will be down in the vicinity of 35,000 deaths per year.”
And here we are, one year later, extremely close to that 35,000 benchmark. Covid has become like a second flu. If this trend continues for another year, we could be down to about 20,000 deaths.
Infectious disease modeler JP Weiland recently wrote that for another significant outbreak, a new line of variants not descended from the original Omicron would probably have to develop. Let’s keep our fingers crossed that it does not happen.
