May 17, 2023 – Traci Sikes' older sister Debbie had survived several health setbacks in her life – a heart attack, a cancer diagnosis and a number of botched surgeries for back problems. But by early 2023, the 68-year-old from Brownwood, Texas, had recovered from lymphoma, was feeling stronger and was celebrating the birthday of one in all her 11 beloved grandchildren.
Then Debbie contracted COVID-19. Almost two months later, in March, she died from severe lung damage brought on by the coronavirus.
Traci was capable of make the trip from her home in Washington state to Texas to be with Debbie before she died. She was grateful that she arrived when her sister was still lucid and that she heard her sister's last words – “love” – spoken to one in all her grandchildren before she took her final breath.
“My sister was wonderful,” Sikes said. “And she shouldn't be gone.”
Just 6 months after President Joe Biden declared last fall that “The pandemic is over,” Debbie's death was a painful reminder to Traci and her family that COVID has not likely gone away. Just as each the World Health Organization and the U.S. government recently ended the three-year-old coronavirus health emergency, COVID continues to be kills more than 100 people every day within the USA, in line with the CDC, and Despite widespread efforts to maneuver forward and lift protective measures, the country's most vulnerable people still face significant risk.
“The prevailing attitude that we must learn to live with the current level of risk feels like a 'slap in the face' to COVID mourners who have already paid the price,” says Sabila Khan, co-founder of a Facebook group for COVID loss support that now has greater than 14,000 members.
This also downplays the continued lack of life and the proven fact that so many individuals still die traumatic and unnecessary deaths, she said.
“It feels like it's been pushed aside,” she said. “As if they're saying, 'It's business as usual. It's over. Take off your mask.' My family and I still wear masks, and we're probably the only mask wearers in a room.”
The failure to take protective measures also ignores the continued and catastrophic risks of Long Covid and the experiences of an estimated 26 million people within the US reside with Long COVID.
“We were taught that death is the only serious outcome [of the virus] and we still haven't made enough room for the idea that long COVID is a very serious outcome,” says Dr. David Putrino, director of rehabilitation innovation at Mount Sinai Health System in New York City, who has cared for thousands of patients with long COVID.
Historic decline in life expectancy
More than 1.1 million Americans have died from COVID in the past three years, and experts say official numbers are likely underestimated due to errors in reporting death certificates. Although deaths have declined compared to the start of the pandemic, the disease has become the fourth leading cause of death in the U.S., behind heart disease, cancer and “unintentional injuries” such as drug overdoses.
What makes these deaths all the more tragic is that COVID is a preventable disease, said Dr. Carla Sevin, an intensive care physician and director of the Pulmonary Patient Care Center at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville. Wearing masks, available vaccines and social distancing have been shown to significantly reduce the risk of spreading and contracting the virus. New medications have also made it possible for infected people to survive COVID.
“It is possible not to spread COVID,” she said. “It is possible to protect yourself from COVID. It is possible to treat COVID. And we don't do all of those things perfectly.”
By the end of 2021, Americans were Die 3 years earlieron average than before the pandemic, with life expectancy falling from 79 to 76 years – the sharpest decline in a century.
Worldwide, the number of COVID deaths is almost 7 million. Across all age groups, on average, every deceased person died 10 years younger than usualThat's tens of millions of years that have been erased.
As US surgeon and health researcher Atul Gawande, MD, expressed it in a New York Times Essay on the response to the pandemic: “Human development has been pushed backwards.”
What is a suitable threshold of death?
In the USA, greater than 80% of deaths from the disease have been found in people aged 65 and over. Underlying medical conditions and disabilities also increase the risk of severe illness and death from COVID.
The virus also kills disproportionately Blacks, Hispanics and Indigenous Peoples and those with less access to health care. Racist groups are dying from COVID in younger years. COVID advocates and Americans who have lost loved ones to the disease say our willingness to accept these facts and the current mortality rate amounts to health-related discrimination.
“Would politicians approach the issue differently if it had primarily affected rich white people?” asked Khan.
Khan's father, Shafqat, was an advocate and community organizer for Pakistani immigrants. After contracting COVID, he was admitted from a rehab facility where he was being treated for an aggressive form of Parkinson's disease to a hospital near his daughter's hometown of Jersey City, New Jersey. During the eight days her father was in the hospital, she and other family members were unable to visit him, and he was not even well enough to talk to him on the phone. He died of COVID in April 2020.
“My father was a unprecedented one who did a lot good, and he died alone and terrified in a hospital,” she said. “I just can't understand it and the way he deserved more. No one deserves this.”
At Vanderbilt University Medical Center, where she works as an intensive care physician, COVID deaths are different today than in the early days of the pandemic, Sevin said. Most patients in the ICU are now older and immunocompromised – and they tend to mingle better with other ICU patients. This makes the effects of COVID even more hidden and easier to ignore.
“It's easy to not appreciate someone who’s an invisible number that you just don't know,” she said. “You don't see them writing their will and talking to their best friend. You don't see the tears rolling down their face because they know what's going to occur to them they usually're going to suffocate.”
One COVID patient who recently died in Sevin's ICU was an elderly woman who had no living relatives. “She was very, very lonely and we’d stand outside the door on our rounds and she or he would wave us in, but then we’d all need to placed on gowns,” Sevin said. “It's just heartbreaking that individuals still need to undergo this.”
Sevin finds it frustrating that so many of the measures that health officials have fought so hard for over the past three years – including face mask-wearing guidelines, government-funded vaccination clinics and access to potentially life-saving antiviral drugs – are now being eliminated because of the lifting of the pandemic emergency.
What makes matters worse is that public awareness of the need to take precautions to protect others is gradually waning and an “all or nothing” attitude prevails in the face of ongoing risks.
“Either I stay home and live a hermit life, or I throw caution to the wind, go to bars and let people scream in my face,” she said. “We've learned some hard lessons and I wish we could hold on to them.”
Americans like Traci Sikes, who have lost loved ones and health care workers on the front lines, say it is especially frustrating that so many people see the current response to the risks of COVID as “Personal decision” instead of responsibility towards othersas well as a sense of fatalism and lack of urgent care.
“Why doesn't anyone appear to be upset about this?” Sikes asked. “People speak about COVID as if it's just one other disease that may kill you. But my sister didn't need to die from it.”