People are waiting in line to be tested for COVID-19 at Union Station in Los Angeles, California.
A 35-year-old man returned to the U.S. from China on January 15, 2020 and developed a cough and a high temperature.
Four days after reading an alert from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about an outbreak of a novel coronaviruses in Wuhan, he sought treatment at an urgent care clinic in Washington.
The first case of coronaviruses in the U.S. was confirmed by the CDC on January 21st, but the agency later found the virus had arrived on the West Coast as early as December.
The man said he had not been to the seafood market in the city. He was taken to the isolation unit at Providence Regional Medical Center.
The public was told by the CDC that the risk remained low after confirmation of the Washington state case. The CDC said that there was growing evidence of person-to-person transmission of the virus, but that it was unclear how easily it was spreading between people.
President Donald Trump told CNBC that the U.S. had it under control.
There is one person coming in from China. We have it under control. In an interview from the World Economic Forum, Trump told Joe Kernen that it was going to be fine.
On January 31, Anthony Fauci would confirm the public's worst fears. The Seattle Flu Study started looking at the data from Wuhan. Early on, it became clear that person-to-person transmission was happening. The team was able to identify another Covid case in a 15-year-old who hadn't recently traveled by using the flu study's databank.
Dr. Nancy Messonnier, a senior CDC official, warned in February that it was no longer possible to contain the virus at the nation's borders. She said that the central question was how many people in this country will have severe illness.
Since that first confirmed case, the virus has torn through the U.S. with a ferocity and duration few anticipated. There are more than 860,000 people dead and 69 million infections. Hospitals around the nation have seen more than 4 million admissions of confirmed Covid patients since August 2020, when the CDC started tracking hospitalizations. The wave of cases that first hit the U.S. in the spring of 2020 are not included in the hospital admissions count.
Though the U.S. now has effective vaccines and drugs to fight Covid, the future course of the epidemic remains uncertain as the virus becomes more transmissible and can evade vaccine protection. The omicron variant has pushed infections and hospitalizations to record highs across the globe this month, a shock to a weary public that wants a return to normal life after two years of lockdowns, event cancellation and vaccine mandates.
Many elected leaders, public health officials and scientists were surprised by the rapid evolution of the virus. The future course of the Pandemic will be determined by the Covid mutations, according to Dr. Michael Osterholm, a top epidemiologist.
The director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy in Minnesota told CNBC that they don't yet understand how these variants emerge and what they are capable of doing. Omicron caught us as a global community surprised by the rapid transmission. He said to look at the impact delta had on disease severity.
The U.S. began to let its guard down as new infections began to decline in the spring of 2021. The CDC said that the vaccine is safe to wear indoors. The U.S. was close to declaring independence from the virus according to President Joe Biden.
The delta variant was taking hold in the U.S. and would soon cause a new wave of infections, hospitalization and death as the vaccine rates slowed. Public health leaders have had a hard time convincing skeptics to get the shots.
More than a year after the first vaccine was administered in the U.S., about 70% of Americans older than 5 have been fully vaccined, according to CDC data. Despite the fact that data shows that shots are safe and effective at preventing illness and death, millions of Americans still don't get their shots.
The divisive politics and community reaction to this were going to occur in January of 2020. The kind of vaccine hesitancy and hostility that has occurred would have been unimaginable.
Delta was twice as transmissible as previous versions and it caused more severe disease in unvaccinated people. The CDC would encourage everyone, regardless of vaccine status, to wear masks indoors in areas of substantial transmission as the Delta spread.
The vaccines took a hit when omicron came out. They still protect against illness and death, but they are less effective at preventing infections from omicron. Chu said the U.S. relied on vaccines to prevent transmission of the virus, but also emphasized testing and masking to control a variant that can evade immunity.
Chu said that they now know that the virus can be repeated, that it can have vaccine breakthrough, and that it can continue to evade us for a long time.
A team of researchers bring together models to forecast the trajectory of the epidemic. The omicron wave of cases and hospitalizations will likely peak before the end of the month. Up to 98,000 additional deaths from the omicron wave are projected by their most optimistic projection.
The US is currently reporting an average of more than 736,000 new infections per day. The average daily infections are down 8% from the previous week. The US is reporting more deaths per day than any other country.
Chu said it was frustrating and tragic to see people dying from vaccine preventable diseases.
The implications of omicron for the future are not known. In the classic view, viruses become less severe in order to make it easier to find new hosts.
The jump to omicron suggests there is lots of space for it to change dramatically, so there are lots of reasons to believe that it isn't true. There are more than 30 changes on the spikeProtein that bind to human cells. The shots target a spikeProtein, which makes it more difficult for vaccine-generated antibodies to block infections.
Doctors and infectious disease experts in South Africa said that the variant peaked and began to decline rapidly, demonstrating a different trajectory than past strains. The researchers said that the deaths and admissions at the Steve Biko Academic Hospital were lower.
The researchers wrote that if this pattern continues and is repeated globally, we are likely to see a complete decoupling of case and death rates.
As the population's immunity increases, the virus could become less disruptive to society as it becomes mild.
The head of the World Health Organization warned earlier this week that the Pandemic is "nowhere near over" and that new variant are likely to emerge as omicron rapidly spread across the world.
Everybody wants to get to endemic. He has 46 years of experience as an epidemiologist, but he still doesn't know what that means. We can go for a period of time with relatively low activity, like we have seen in many places in the world, and then a new variant could change all that overnight. We don't know our future yet.
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