Experts warn of risks as US drops jab mandates

WASHINGTON－More states and big cities across the United States are lifting their vaccination and mask mandates as the rate of COVID-19 infections falls, but health experts have warned that dropping pandemic protocols too soon may help the virus spread.

California, the most populous state, unveiled a milestone plan on Thursday, as Governor Gavin Newsom said the state would become the first to treat the coronavirus as a manageable, "endemic" risk.

More US states and cities are doing the same as COVID-19 cases, hospital admissions and deaths fall nationwide.

The country is now averaging about 120,000 daily new cases, 43 percent fewer than in the previous week, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Friday.

About 2,000 new deaths are being reported in the country daily, 14.5 percent fewer than in the previous week.

However, public health experts are watching the trend warily. About 76 percent of the population have received at least one vaccine shot, but that leaves millions of people who have not.

To drop effective public health strategies such as vaccination and mask mandates too soon may help the virus spread, they said.

'Virus constantly mutating'

"The coronavirus is an RNA virus that is constantly mutating," Zhang Zuofeng, chair of the Department of Epidemiology at the University of California, Los Angeles, told Xinhua News Agency.

"The next outbreak may return in fall or winter this year."

However, the next wave may not be as devastating as the outbreaks caused by the Delta and Omicron variants because the toxicity of the coronavirus may decrease as the virus mutates to survive, Zhang said.

The Omicron variant continues to be dominant in all infection cases in the US, with the CDC predicting the national proportion of Omicron to be 100 percent for the week ending Feb 12.

An Omicron subvariant, known as BA.2, accounted for 3.9 percent of all infections, up from 1.6 percent in the week ending Jan 29.

There have been more than 1 million excess deaths in the US during the pandemic, The Guardian said in a recent report.

The deaths are mainly attributable to COVID-19, as well as conditions that may have resulted from delayed medical care and overwhelmed health systems, the report quoted figures from the CDC as saying.

At least 935,000 people in the US have died from COVID-19, according to Johns Hopkins University. Other causes of death above the normally expected number include heart disease, hypertension and Alzheimer's disease.

Excess deaths are calculated based on previous years' fatalities. In 2019 there were 2.8 million deaths in the US. In 2020 there were about 3.3 million, the report said.

The US is also in the midst of an overdose crisis, with more than 100,000 overdose deaths in the first year of the pandemic, the report said.

Xinhua - Agencies