Experts say Americans can assume COVID infections much higher than official counts: media

LOS ANGELES - Experts say Americans can assume COVID-19 infections in their communities are five to ten times higher than official counts, said an article published by The Washington Post on Tuesday.

Some Americans are now navigating murky waters in the latest wave of the pandemic, with highly transmissible subvariants of Omicron spreading as governments drop measures to contain the virus and reveal less data about infections, the article, titled "How big is the latest US coronavirus wave? No one really knows", pointed out.

With public health authorities shifting their focus to COVID-related hospitalizations as the pandemic's US death toll hits 1 million, people are largely on their own to gauge risk amid what could be a stealth surge, the article noted.

"Any sort of look at the metrics on either a local, state or national level is a severe undercount," Jessica Malaty Rivera, an epidemiologist at the Pandemic Prevention Institute housed at The Rockefeller Foundation, was quoted as saying by the article, adding that "Everyone knows someone getting covid now."

Hospitalizations nationally have increased 50 percent since bottoming out six weeks ago. But the roughly 23,000 patients with COVID-19 in hospitals over the last week still represent near the lowest hospitalization levels of the entire pandemic. The recent increase is driven by the Northeast, where hospitalization rates are almost twice as high as any other region, according to the article.

Reported cases of COVID have also tripled in the Northeast in just over a month, driving much of the growth nationally, said the article, citing US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)'s data, adding that the latest uptick in infections is testing a new CDC alert system adopted by many local and state governments that categorizes COVID-19 community levels as "low" even with the number of new cases rising to a level once considered high.

Public health authorities are not as worried about rising cases because the infected are increasingly vaccinated and boosted and have access to therapeutics such as the antiviral Paxlovid that help prevent people from becoming seriously ill. But doctors say the new CDC public reporting categories obscure the true risk of contracting COVID-19, which still disrupts lives, can lead to long-term complications, and poses heightened danger for the elderly and immunocompromised, according to the article.

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, an independent research center at the University of Washington in Seattle, estimates only about 13 percent of cases are being detected. But the organization's director Christopher Murray was quoted as saying by the article that the United States is still in good shape and not on track to experience a surge of Omicron subvariants seen in the United Kingdom.