Pandemic ‘End In Sight’: Where COVID-19 Stands In MA

MASSACHUSETTS — The “end is in sight” for the pandemic, the World Health Organization said this week, but there are still precautions Massachusetts residents should take to live with COVID-19, according to health officials.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data shows new U.S. cases and hospitalizations are trending downward to the lowest level since the pandemic began. Still, the number of deaths — an average of 357 a day, according to the CDC’s seven-day rolling average — are far above the average of 168 daily deaths for the week ending July 6, 2022. Just three months ago, the average was 258 daily deaths.

In Massachusetts, there were 37 COVID-19 deaths over the last week, according to the state Department of Public Health. There were also 15 "probable deaths" linked to the virus over the same period.

“We have never been in a better position to end the pandemic,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a briefing Wednesday after COVID-19 deaths reached their lowest level — 11,000 for the week of Sept. 5-11 — since the pandemic began.

“We are not there yet, but the end is in sight,” he said, warning that “now is the worst time to stop running” in the race against the virus.

The United States is seeing “an important shift in our fight against the virus,” White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha said at a briefing earlier this month.

That’s if the virus doesn’t mutate again, making a new omicron-specific booster shot less effective.

“In the absence of dramatically different variants, we likely are moving towards a path with a vaccination cadence similar to that of the annual influenza vaccine, with annual updated COVID-19 shots matched to the currently circulating strains for most of the population,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy of Infectious Diseases, said at the briefing.

Health officials recommend the new booster shot for all Americans, but especially for people 50 and older and people with underlying health issues.

Just over 79 percent of the U.S. population has received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine, but the number of people who are fully vaccinated with one booster shot drops off significantly, standing at 48 percent.

In Massachusetts, about 5.4 million residents were fully vaccinated as of Sept. 14, and another 3.2 million had received at least one booster shot.

Hospitalizations are an important metric used by health officials to track the impact of COVID-19 in specific areas. The most current CDC hospitalization forecast says admissions will “remain stable or have an uncertain trend,” with between 1,300 to 7,700 new confirmed admissions likely by the first week in October.

As of Sept. 13, 591 people in Massachusetts were hospitalized with COVID-19, 182 of them hospitalized for coronavirus only. Forty-eight people were in intensive care due to COVID-19.