WASHINGTON — The calendar has flipped to January, and the weather has turned cold in most of the country. For the past two years, that meant a Covid spike was imminent. How does 2023 look? In some ways similar and in other ways very different. But politics haven’t gone away as a factor in how people see the coronavirus.
To start with, the familiar winter increase in Covid cases is back again this year.
There were about 320,000 new Covid cases in the U.S. the week of Oct. 5, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Just a few months later, there were about 415,000 last week. That’s an increase of roughly 30%.
That certainly doesn’t sound good, and some communities have responded to the bump with a familiar tactic — mask mandates for students in Boston, Philadelphia and other cities.
But compare those numbers to where the country was last year at this time and you see a sharp difference.
The week of Jan. 11, 2022, there were more than 5.4 million new Covid cases in the U.S., according to the CDC. And that wasn’t the end of that spike. It was just a step on the way up to the high point of 5.6 million Covid cases in the week of Jan. 19, 2022.
That was the most new weekly cases in the U.S. throughout the entire pandemic, going back to March 2020, when it first appeared. So far, anyway, this January clearly feels different.
Another way this year feels different: Covid isn’t taking the same toll on people. The country’s death rate from Covid seems to have plateaued — at least somewhat.
To be clear, Covid is still killing people in the U.S. at a fairly high rate — more than 3,900 died last week. That’s more than four times the average weekly number of deaths in traffic accidents in 2021.
The better news is that the Covid death rate hasn’t been rising much in recent months.
Since Oct. 5, the weekly Covid death number has largely bounced between 2,000 and 3,000. Again, that doesn’t exactly sound like “good news,” but last year at this time, it was at 9,400, and it climbed all the way to 17,000 the week of Feb. 2. That’s a marked and positive difference.
One other way 2023 feels unlike 2022 or 2021: People seem less interested in the new Covid vaccine formulated to work better against new variants of the virus. And that’s true even among older people who are the most at risk.
Overall, only 39% of the 65-or-older population has had updated Covid booster shots. Among the same age group, more than 94% got the initial full set of Covid vaccine shots. That’s a pretty staggering drop-off for the new shot.
One lingering effect, however, is the political split at the state level over who is getting those booster shots when you look at the 2020 presidential results. The percentage of 65-or-older vaccine takers is above the national average for the group in 27 states and Washington, D.C.
Three-quarters of those 28 jurisdictions, 21, voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential race. The nine other states voted for Donald Trump.
And the reverse is true for the states that are below the senior booster national average.
More than three-quarters of the 23 states below the national average, 18, voted for Trump in 2020. The five others voted for Biden.
What that will mean going into 2023 is unclear. We don’t yet know how bad this winter’s Covid surge will be. But in a time when change is the watchword, the nation’s political divide looks remarkably durable. From the officials inside the Beltway to the voters outside it to the reactions to a virus that shook the world for two years, the nation’s blue/red split seems to be an abiding constant for 2023.
