The Coronavirus Has Infected More Than Half of Americans, the C.D.C. Reports

“But prior infection does not guarantee protection from the virus, officials said, and Americans should still get vaccinated and boosted.

Published April 26, 2022 Updated April 27, 2022

Covid testing at a site in Oakland, Calif. The country has seen about a five-fold drop in P.C.R. testing since the Omicron peak, so tracking new cases has been difficult.Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Sixty percent of Americans, including 75 percent of children, had been infected with the coronavirus by February, federal health officials reported on Tuesday — another remarkable milestone in a pandemic that continues to confound expectations.

The highly contagious Omicron variant was responsible for much of the toll. In December 2021, as the variant began spreading, only half as many people had antibodies indicating prior infection, according to new research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

While the numbers came as a shock to many Americans, some scientists said they had expected the figures to be even higher, given the contagious variants that have marched through the nation over the past two years.

There may be good news in the data, some experts said. A gain in population-wide immunity may offer at least a partial bulwark against future waves. And the trend may explain why the surge that is now roaring through China and many countries in Europe has been muted in the United States.

A high percentage of previous infections may also mean that there are now fewer cases of life-threatening illness or death relative to infections. “We will see less and less severe disease, and more and more a shift toward clinically mild disease,” said Florian Krammer, an immunologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York.

“It will be more and more difficult for the virus to do serious damage,” he added.

Administration officials, too, believe that the data augur a new phase of the pandemic in which infections may be common at times but cause less harm.

At a news briefing on Tuesday, Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House’s new Covid coordinator, said that stopping infections was “not even a policy goal. The goal of our policy should be: obviously, minimize infections whenever possible, but to make sure people don’t get seriously ill.”

The average number of confirmed new cases a day in the United States — more than 49,000 as of Monday, according to a New York Times database — is comparable to levels last seen in late July, even as cases have risen by over 50 percent over the past two weeks, a trend infectious disease experts have attributed to new Omicron subvariants.

Dr. Jha and other officials warned against complacency, and urged Americans to continue receiving vaccinations and booster shots, saying that antibodies from prior infections did not guarantee protection from the virus.

During the Omicron surge, infections rose most sharply among children and adolescents, according to the new research. Prior infections increased least among adults aged 65 and older, who have the highest rates of vaccination and may be most likely to take precautions.

“Evidence of previous Covid-19 infections substantially increased among every age group,” Dr. Kristie Clarke, the agency researcher who led the new study, said at a news briefing on Tuesday.

Widespread infection raises a troubling prospect: a potential increase in cases of long Covid, a poorly understood constellation of lingering symptoms.

Up to 30 percent of people infected with the coronavirus may have persistent symptoms, including worrisome changes to the brain and heart. Vaccination is thought to lower the odds of long Covid, although it is unclear by how much.

“The long-term impacts on health care are not clear but certainly worth taking very seriously, as a fraction of people will be struggling for a long time with the consequences,” said Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Even a very small percentage of infected or vaccinated people who develop long Covid would translate to millions nationwide.

While the focus is often on preventing the health care system from buckling under a surge, “we should also be concerned that our health care system will be overwhelmed by the ongoing health care needs of a population with long Covid,” said Zoë McLaren, a health policy expert at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

A mass testing site at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. Millions of Americans with no immunity to the virus remain vulnerable to both the short- and long-term consequences of infection.David Mcnew/Getty Images

There are still tens of millions of Americans with no immunity to the virus, and they remain vulnerable to both the short- and long-term consequences of infection, said Dr. Tom Inglesby, director of the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

“Betting that you are in the 60 percent is a big gamble,” he said. “For anyone who’s not been vaccinated and boosted, I would take this new data as a direct message to get that done or expect that the virus is likely to catch up to you if it hasn’t already.”

Although cases are once again on the upswing, particularly in the Northeast, the rise in hospitalizations has been minimal, and deaths are still dropping. According to the agency’s most recent criteria, more than 98 percent of Americans live in communities with a low or medium level of risk.

Even among those who are hospitalized, “we’re seeing less oxygen use, less I.C.U. stays and we haven’t, fortunately, seen any increase in deaths associated with them,” said the C.D.C.’s director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky. “We are hopeful that positive trends will continue.”

The country has recorded about a five-fold drop in P.C.R. testing for the virus since the Omicron peak, and so tracking new cases has become difficult. But the reported count is far less, about 70-fold lower, said Dr. Walensky, reflecting “a true and reliable drop in our overall cases.”

New subvariants of Omicron, called BA.2 and BA.2.12.1, have supplanted the previous iteration, BA.1, which began circulating in the country in late November and sent cases soaring to record highs in a matter of weeks.

“Of course, even more have been infected now, because BA.2 will have infected some who avoided it thus far,” Dr. Hanage said.

By February, three of four children and adolescents in the country had already been infected with the virus, compared with one-third of older adults, according to the new study.

That so many children are carrying antibodies may offer comfort to parents of those aged 5 and under, who do not qualify for vaccination, since many may have acquired at least some immunity through infection.

But Dr. Clarke urged parents to immunize children who qualify as soon as regulators approve a vaccine for them, regardless of their prior infection. Among children who are hospitalized with the virus, up to 30 percent may need intensive care, she noted.

Although many of those children also have other medical conditions, about 70 percent of cases of multisystem inflammatory disease, a rare consequence of Covid-19 infection, occur in otherwise healthy children.

“As a pediatrician and a parent, I would absolutely endorse the children get vaccinated, even if they have been infected,” Dr. Clarke said.

Some experts said they were concerned about long-term consequences, even in children who have mild symptoms.

“Given the very high proportion of infection in kids and adults that happened earlier this year, I worry about the rise in long Covid cases as a result,” said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University who is studying the condition.

To measure the percentage of the population infected with the virus, the study relied on the presence of antibodies produced in response to an infection.

C.D.C. researchers began assessing antibody levels in people at 10 sites early in the pandemic, and have since expanded that effort to all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. The investigators used a test sensitive enough to identify previously infected people for at least one to two years after exposure.

The researchers analyzed blood samples collected from September 2021 to February 2022 for antibodies to the virus, and then parsed the data by age, sex and geographical location. The investigators looked specifically for a type of antibody produced after infection but not after vaccination.

Between September and December 2021, the prevalence of antibodies in the samples steadily increased by one to two percentage points every four weeks. But it jumped sharply after December, increasing by nearly 25 points by February 2022.

The percentage of samples with antibodies rose from about 45 percent among children aged 11 years and younger, and among adolescents aged 12 to 17 years, to about 75 percent in both age groups.

By February 2022, roughly 64 percent of adults aged 18 to 49 years, about 50 percent of those aged 50 to 64 years and about 33 percent of older adults had been infected, according to the study.

Despite the record high cases during the Omicron surge, the reported statistics may not have captured all infections, because some people have few to no symptoms, may not have opted for testing or may have tested themselves at home.

According to one upcoming C.D.C. study, there may be more than three infections for each reported case, Dr. Clarke said.

Noah Weiland contributed reporting from Washington.

Apoorva Mandavilli is a reporter for The New York Times, focusing on science and global health. She is the 2019 winner of the Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting. @apoorva_nyc

A version of this article appears in print on April 27, 2022, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: 60% of Nation Has Had Virus, C.D.C. “

How 3 Young African Americans Friends Built A Beach Front Bar In The Gambia

OPINION CHARLES M. BLOW The Pandemic Exposed Our Empathy Deficit

The Pandemic Exposed Our Empathy Deficit

April 27, 2022

Nick Oxford for The New York Times

Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser, told “PBS NewsHour” that “certainly” America is now “out of the pandemic phase” of Covid-19 as our rates of new infections, hospitalizations and deaths continue to ebb. But, he added, “We’re not going to eradicate this virus.” Our best hope is to “keep that level very low, and intermittently vaccinate people,” possibly as often as every year.

Put another way, the endemic has arrived.

As Fauci later told The Washington Post, “We’re really in a transitional phase, from a deceleration of the numbers into hopefully a more controlled phase and endemicity.”

The cost to get here has been almost incalculable. There have been 81 million recorded Covid cases in America and nearly a million deaths. The United States is now averaging about 360 deaths a day from Covid, which would be an alarming number in almost any other context, but it looks like progress when measured against the pandemic’s peak, when thousands of people were dying each day.

Still, this moment doesn’t feel as celebratory as it did last summer. In a triumphant speech on July 4, Biden declared that “245 years ago, we declared our independence from a distant king. Today, we’re closer than ever to declaring our independence from a deadly virus.” He was, however, quick to say that the battle against Covid was far from over: “We’ve got a lot more work to do.”

We would, in fact, have another deadly wave of the virus.

We are now weary of any talk of independence from the virus or victory over it. People celebrate small things, like those who clapped on airplanes last week when they were told that masks were no longer required.

We have been well taught by this virus, humbled by it, so that we now understand that it has no intention of doing what Donald Trump once promised it would: “One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.”

What has fluttered away instead are our patience and our precautions.

An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll of American adults released last month found, “Fewer than half are always or often avoiding nonessential travel, staying away from large groups, and wearing a face mask outside of their homes” for the first time since at least February 2021. “And just a third are avoiding others as much as possible.”

People have absorbed their personal risk calculations and simply decided that they will return more to a so-called normal life, even as the virus continues to claim lives.

We seem, as a society, to have become resigned to the virus, accepting a certain level of sickness and death as the new normal.

But what prevents the remnants of the virus from settling on the topography of America’s existing inequalities? What becomes of all the trauma? How is it treated?

How can we even begin to connect the dots between rises in violent crime and rises in depression among young people, financial stress and the staggered levels of disruption and death?

Take, for instance, a report released last week by the Pew Research Center, which found that economic hardships in the first nine months of the pandemic fell hardest on lower- and middle-income families. “From 2019 to 2020, the median income of lower-income households decreased by 3.0 percent and the median income of middle-income households fell by 2.1 percent,” the researchers wrote. “In contrast, the median income of upper-income households in 2020 was about the same as it was in 2019.”

While the well-off shopped online and dreamed of delayed vacations, whole swaths of America were falling into an even more desperate state. The pandemic wasn’t an inconvenience but instead a life-altering experience, a complete reordering of things, a gateway to more suffering, not just from illness but also from society’s ills.

Hunger, trauma, violence. The pandemic exacerbated all three, and more. But we don’t center therapeutic remedies in our discussions of what’s next. We center crackdowns and handouts. We center moving on over getting back up. We center a “return to normal” over the plights of those for whom normal was never enough.

An America now plagued by endemic disease faces a real challenge: Will we behave differently and do better, will we care for people rather than cuff them, or will we resort to the response we too often have — of not allowing ourselves to truly register need so that we don’t have to truly contend with it?

Climate Change Will Accelerate Viral Spillovers, Study Finds

“In a warming world, bats in Southeast Asia will be especially prone to spreading viruses to other mammals, researchers found.

April 28, 2022, 5:00 a.m. ET

Over the next 50 years, climate change will drive thousands of viruses to jump from one species of mammal to another, according to a study published in Nature on Thursday. The shuffling of viruses among animals may increase the risk that one will jump into humans and cause a new pandemic, the researchers said.

Scientists have long warned that a warming planet may increase the burden of diseases. Malaria, for example, is expected to spread as the mosquitoes that carry it expand their range into warming regions. But climate change might also usher in entirely new diseases, by allowing pathogens to move into new host species.

“We know that species are moving, and when they do, they’re going to have these chances to share viruses,” said Colin Carlson, a biologist at Georgetown University and a co-author of the new study.

To understand what that sharing will look like, Dr. Carlson and his colleagues built a computer model of potential spillovers in a warming world. The researchers started by projecting how thousands of mammals might shift their ranges as the climate changes between now and 2070.

As temperatures increase, many species are expected to spread away from the blazing Equator to find more comfortable habitats. Others may move up the sides of hills and mountains to find cooler altitudes. When different species come into contact for the first time, the viruses may be able to infect new hosts.

To understand the odds of a successful new infection, the researchers began by building a database of viruses and their mammalian hosts. Some viruses have been found in more than one species of mammal, which means that they must have jumped the species barrier at some point in the past.

Using a computational technique called machine learning, the researchers developed a model that could predict whether two host species share a virus.

The more that two species overlap geographically, the researchers found, the more likely they were to share a virus. That’s because the hosts were more likely to encounter each other, giving their viruses more opportunities to move between them.

Dr. Carlson and his colleagues also showed that closely related species were more likely to share a virus than were distant relatives. That’s probably because closely related mammals are similar in their biochemistry. A virus adapted to exploit one species is more likely to thrive in a relative. It may also be able to evade an immune system similar to one to which it’s already adapted.

These findings enabled Dr. Carlson and his colleagues to make predictions about what would happen when mammal species come together for the first time in a hotter world.

Among the 3,139 species studied, the researchers anticipated more than 4,000 instances in which viruses would move from one species to another. In some cases, just one virus will make the jump. But the models also predicted that multiple viruses carried by one species would spread to the other.

The researchers were not able to say exactly which viruses would move between which species. What matters, they argued, is the sheer scale of what’s to come.

“When you’re trying to predict the weather, you don’t predict individual raindrops,” said Christopher Trisos, an ecologist at the University of Cape Town and a co-author of the new study. “You predict the clouds themselves.”

Rachel Baker, a disease ecologist at Princeton University who was not involved in the study, said that the research was an important step forward in understanding how climate change will affect the world’s dangerous viruses. Previous studies have focused on single viruses, as opposed to surveying the entire world.

“It’s a great advance,” she said. “We want to know as soon as possible if there’s some link between climate change and pathogen spillover.”

Bats in Southeast Asia will be especially prone to these transmissions, the researchers found. As of now, many bat species in that region are limited to small ranges and don’t come into contact with each other much. But as the planet warms, these bats will fly quickly to suitable climates and encounter new species.

These findings may be particularly ominous for humans. As viruses move to new host species, they evolve — and can potentially evolve in ways that make them more likely to infect people. The coronavirus that caused SARS in 2002 originated in Chinese horseshoe bats and then jumped to another species — possibly raccoon dogs sold in Chinese animal markets — before infecting people.

In February, scientists released two studies asserting that Covid arose through a similar sequence of events, with a coronavirus jumping from bats to wild mammals sold at markets in Wuhan before infecting humans.

“We believe that is something that could happen a lot as a result of the interspecific transmission events that we’re predicting,” said Gregory Albery, a disease ecologist at Georgetown University and a co-author on the new study.

When the researchers looked at the places mammals might end up in 2070, they found another reason to expect new human epidemics: They won’t be migrating to wildlife refuges. “It turns out those are all the places we’ve built cities,” Dr. Carlson said.

A rare rodent that has little contact with humans today might pass a virus on to raccoons, which live comfortably in urban areas. “That is opening up an entirely new pathway for this virus to spread into humans,” Dr. Albery said.

Dr. Christine Johnson, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the study, cautioned that such a broad model can’t account for details that may have a big impact on individual viruses. “We need locally grounded field studies to understand the impacts of climate on species’ movements and disease transmission risk,” she said.

Climate-driven spillovers may start long before 2070. After all, the planet is already 1.1 degrees Celsius warmer than it was in the 19th century. In their computer model, the researchers found that there has already been sufficient climate change to start mixing viruses up, although their model doesn’t let them point to particular viruses that have made a jump.

“The amount of warming we’ve had has been enough to set it in motion,” Dr. Carlson said.“

The Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class

“Since the Great Recession, the college-educated have taken more frontline jobs at companies like Starbucks and Amazon. Now they’re helping to unionize them.

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Claire Chang, a leader of the effort to unionize the REI store in Manhattan, graduated from college in 2014.Credit...DeSean McClinton-Holland for The New York Times

By Noam Scheiber

April 28, 2022, 5:00 a.m. ET

Over the past decade-and-a-half, many young, college-educated workers have faced a disturbing reality: that it was harder for them to reach the middle class than for previous generations. The change has had profound effects — driving shifts in the country’s politics and mobilizing employees to demand fairer treatment at work. It may also be giving the labor movement its biggest lift in decades.

Members of this college-educated working class typically earn less money than they envisioned when they went off to school. “It’s not like anyone is expecting to make six figures,” said Tyler Mulholland, who earns about $23 an hour as a sales lead at REI, the outdoor equipment retailer, and holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education. “But when it’s snow storming at 11:30 at night, I don’t want to have to think, ‘Is the Uber home going to make a difference in my weekly budget?’”

In many cases, the workers have endured bouts of unemployment. After Clint Shiflett, who holds an associate degree in computer science, lost his job installing satellite dishes in early 2020, he found a cheaper place to live and survived on unemployment insurance for months. He was eventually hired at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama, where he initially made about $17.50 an hour working the overnight shift.

And they complain of being trapped in jobs that don’t make good use of their skills. Liz Alanna, who holds a bachelor’s in music education and a master’s in opera performance, began working at Starbucks while auditioning for music productions in the early 2010s. She stayed with the company to preserve her health insurance after getting married and having children.

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“I don’t think I should have to have a certain job just so I can have health care,” Ms. Alanna said. “I could be doing other types of jobs that might fall better in my wheelhouse.”

These experiences, which economic research shows became more common after the Great Recession, appear to have united many young college-educated workers around two core beliefs: They have a sense that the economic grand bargain available to their parents — go to college, work hard, enjoy a comfortable lifestyle — has broken down. And they see unionizing as a way to resurrect it.

Support for labor unions among college graduates has increased from 55 percent in the late 1990s to around 70 percent in the last few years, and is even higher among younger college graduates, according to data provided by Gallup. “I think a union was really kind of my only option to make this a viable choice for myself and other people,” said Mr. Mulholland, 32, who helped lead the campaign to unionize his Manhattan REI store in March. Mr. Shiflett and Ms. Alanna have also been active in the campaigns to unionize their workplaces.

And those efforts, in turn, may help explain an upsurge for organized labor, with filings for union elections up more than 50 percent over a similar period one year ago.

Though a minority at most nonprofessional workplaces, college-educated workers are playing a key role in propelling them toward unionization, experts say, because the college-educated often feel empowered in ways that others don’t. “There’s a class confidence, I would call it,” said Ruth Milkman, a sociologist of labor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. “A broader worldview that encompasses more than getting through the day.”

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While other workers at companies like Starbucks and Amazon are also supportive of unions and sometimes take the initiative in forming them, the presence of the college-educated in these jobs means there is a “layer of people who particularly have their antennae up,” Ms. Milkman added. “There is an additional layer of leadership.”

The State of Jobs in the United States

Job openings and the number of workers voluntarily leaving their positions in the United States remained near record levels in March.

• March Jobs Report: U.S. employers added 431,000 jobs and the unemployment rate fell to 3.6 percent ​​in the third month of 2022.
• Job Market and Stocks: This year’s decline in stock prices follows a historical pattern: Hot labor markets and stocks often don’t mix well.
• New Career Paths: For some, the Covid-19 crisis presented an opportunity to change course. Here is how these six people pivoted professionally.
• Return to the Office: Many companies are loosening Covid safety rules, leaving people to navigate social distancing on their own. Some workers are concerned.

That workers who attended college would be attracted to nonprofessional jobs at REI, Starbucks and Amazon is not entirely surprising. Over the past decade, the companies’ appetite for workers has grown substantially. Starbucks increased its global work force to nearly 385,000 last year from about 135,000 in 2010. Amazon’s work force swelled to 1.6 million from 35,000 during that period.

The companies appeal to affluent and well-educated consumers. And they offer solid wages and benefits for their industries — even, for that matter, compared with some other industries that employ the college-educated.

More than three years after he earned a political science degree from Siena College in 2017, Brian Murray was making about $14 an hour as a youth counselor at a group home for middle-school-age children.

He quit in late 2020 and was hired a few months later at a Starbucks in the Buffalo area, where his wage increased to $15.50 an hour. “The starting wage was higher than anything I’d ever made,” said Mr. Murray, who has helped organize Starbucks workers in the city.

Such examples appear to reflect broader economic forces. Data from the past 30 years collected by the economists Jaison R. Abel and Richard Deitz at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York showed that unemployment for recent college graduates shot up to over 7 percent in 2009 and was above 5.3 percent — the highest previously recorded — as late as 2015.

Jesse Rothstein, a former chief economist of the U.S. Labor Department, found in a 2021 paper that the job prospects for recent college graduates began to weaken around 2005, then suffered a significant blow during the Great Recession and had not fully recovered a decade later.“