Coronavirus Daily News Brief – Jan. 12: Four Years In, Deaths Continue Unabated; U.S. Covid Hospitalizations Increase for 9th Straight Week

Travelers at Toronto Pearson Airport in February 2020

Good morning. This is Jonathan Spira, director of research at the Center for Long Covid Research, reporting. Here now the news of the pandemic from across the globe on the 1,402nd day of the pandemic.

THE LEDE

The First Covid Death Was Four Years Ago Today

(This story originally appeared in Frequent Business Traveler on January 11, 2024)

On January 11, 2020, Chinese state media reported what is considered to have been the known death what we then referred to as an illness caused by the novel virus and now refer to as SARS-CoV2. At the time of this person’s death, the virus had infected merely dozens of people.

As of January 11, 2024, the world had recorded 701.62 million officially reported cases, although the actual number is believed to be far higher due to the prevalence of at-home testing from which positive test results are not reported to a local health authority.

The 61-year-old man who died that day in 2020 was a regular customer at the wet market in Wuhan. The report of his death came just before one of China’s biggest holidays, when hundreds of millions of people travel across the country.

On January 20, the first confirmed Covid cases outside mainland China were reported, in Japan, South Korea and Thailand, according to the World Health Organization’s first situation report.

The first confirmed case in the United States came on January 21 in Washington State, where a man in his 30s began to exhibit symptoms after returning from a trip to Wuhan.

By January 23, a small numbers of cases began to be reported outside Wuhan and then outside China, Wuhan, a city of more than 11 million, was cut off by the Chinese authorities.

The city was effectively walled in as authorities canceled planes and trains leaving the city, and suspended all forms of public transit including buses, subways, and ferries within it. At this point, at least 17 people had died and more than 570 others had been infected, including in Taiwan, Japan, Thailand, South Korea and the United States.

By month’s end, thousands of new cases had been reported in China and the WHO declared a “public health emergency of international concern.”

With no apparent sense of irony, China’s Foreign Ministry said it would continue to work with the WHO and foreign countries to protect public health.

Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department issued a warning telling travelers to avoid going to China.

On January 31, the global death toll was already 213 and there had been 9,800 reported cases.

In news we report today, Covid hospitalizations in the United States are up for the 9th straight week, influenza hospitalizations declined slightly, and the Covid death toll continues unabated.

LONG COVID

A new study published Friday examines the role of T cells in Long Covid.

Published in the journal Nature Immunology and conducted by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco and Gladstone Institutes, the study, which looked at 43 people who had SARS-CoV-2 in 2020, prior to the advent of coronavirus vaccines, revealed distinct differences between 16 who fully recovered and 27 with persistent symptoms.

“A striking finding we made was that while this T-cell coordination was observed in those that successfully recovered from Long Covid, as expected of normal, healthy individuals, it was lost in those with Long Covid,” said the study’s lead author, Nadia Roan.

T-cells typically coordinate the immune attack by activating cytotoxic T cells, macrophages, and stimulating antibody production by B cell lymphocytes.

UNITED STATES      

Covid hospitalizations increased in the United State for the ninth week in a row, the CDC reported. Meanwhile, hospitalizations caused by influenza declined slightly, the agency said.

The death toll in the United States from SARS-CoV-2 is currently tenfold greater than the number of deaths caused by the flu.  For the week ending December 9, the last week for which there is complete data, the Covid death toll was 1,614, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, while the average over the last four weeks of complete data is 1,488 deaths per week.

This stands in stark contrast to the number of deaths due to influenza in the same period.  For the week ending December 9, that figure was 163.

GLOBAL

Four years after the first death from Covid, the death toll continues at an alarming rate.  In December 2023, almost 10,000 succumbed to SARS-CoV-2 globally, according to data from the WHO.

GLOBAL STATISTICS

Now here are the daily statistics for Friday, January 12.

As of Friday morning, the world has recorded 701.62 million Covid-19 cases, an increase of 0.05 million in the last 24 hours, and 6.97 million deaths, according to Worldometer, a service that tracks such information. In addition, 672.60 million people worldwide have recovered from the virus, an increase of 0.1 million.

The reader should note that infrequent reporting from some sources may appear as spikes in new case figures or death tolls as well as the occasional downward or upward adjustment as corrections to case figures warrant.

Worldwide, the number of active coronavirus cases as of Friday at press time is 22,045,940, an increase of 21,000. Out of that figure, 99.8%, or 22,009,416, are considered mild, and 0.2%, or 36,524, are listed as critical. The percentage of cases considered critical has not changed over the past 16 months.

Since the start of the pandemic, the United States has, as of Friday, recorded 110.47 million cases, a higher figure than any other country, and a death toll of 1.19 million. India has the world’s second highest number of officially recorded cases, 45.02 million, and a reported death toll of 533,412.

The newest data from Russia’s Rosstat state statistics service showed that, at the end of July 2022, the number of Covid or Covid-related deaths since the start of the pandemic there in April 2020 is now 823,623, giving the country the world’s second highest pandemic-related death toll, behind the United States.  Rosstat last reported that 3,284 people died from the coronavirus or related causes in July 2022, down from 5,023 in June, 7,008 in May and 11,583 in April.

Meanwhile, France is the country with the third highest number of cases, with 40.14 million, and Germany is in the number four slot, with 38.79 million total cases.

Brazil, which has recorded the third highest number of deaths as a result of the virus, 708,739, has recorded 38.23 million cases, placing it in the number five slot.

The other five countries with total case figures over the 20 million mark are South Korea, with 34.57 million cases, as number six; Japan, with 33.8 million cases placing it in the number seven slot; and Italy, with 26.67 million, as number eight, as well as the United Kingdom, with 24.81 million, and Russia, with 23.8 million, as nine and ten respectively.

CURRENT U.S. COVID STATISTICS AT A GLANCE

In the United States, in the week ending January 6, 2022, the test positivity rate was, based on data released on January 12, 2024 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was 12.7%, and the trend in test positivity is -0.1% in the most recent week. Meanwhile, the percentage of emergency department visits that were diagnosed as SARS-CoV-2 was 2.9%, and the trend in emergency department visits is -13.1%.

The number of people admitted to hospital in the United States due to SARS-CoV-2 in the same 7-day period was 35,801, a figure that is up 3.2% over the past 7-day period. Meanwhile, the percentage of deaths due to SARS-CoV-2 was 4%, a figure that is up +14.3% for the period.

VACCINATION SPOTLIGHT

Some 70.6% of the world population has received at least one dose of coronavirus vaccine by Friday, according to Our World in Data, an online scientific publication that tracks such information.  So far, 13.53 billion doses of the vaccine have been administered on a global basis and 5,316 doses are now administered each day.

Meanwhile, only 32.9% of people in low-income countries have received one dose, while in countries such as Canada, China, Denmark, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States, at least 75% of the population has received at least one dose of vaccine.

Only a handful of the world’s poorest countries – Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia and Nepal – have reached the 70% mark in vaccinations. Many countries, however, are under 20% and, in countries such as Haiti, Senegal, and Tanzania, for example, vaccination rates remain at or below 10%.

In addition, with the beginning of vaccinations in North Korea in late September, Eritrea remains the only country in the world that has not administered vaccines in any significant number.

Anna Breuer contributed reporting to this story.

The Coronavirus Daily News Brief is a publication of the Center for Long Covid Research. www.longcov.org

If you have Long Covid and need to talk to someone, call the Long Covid Patient Peer Counseling Phone Line, or HOPELINE.  The HOPELINE is our free, confidential support and information service.

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