Covid continues surging across the US, but deaths are lower than their peaks earlier in the pandemic due in large part to vaccinations and immunity. Yet the country is still struggling to find its footing on vaccination as the virus settles into a pattern of twice-annual surges.
Covid was not as deadly in 2023 as it was in prior years, falling from the fourth to the 10th leading cause of death, according to a study by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Deaths overall fell by 6% from 2022 to 2023.
Covid vaccines have saved millions of lives, a new study in the Lancet confirms. The vaccines reduced deaths by at least 59% between December 2020 and March 2023, amounting to more than 1.6 million lives saved in Europe alone, the researchers found.
But Covid continues to cause hospitalizations and deaths, as well as disruption from illness and long Covid. More than 5% of Americans reported they were currently experiencing long Covid symptoms this spring.
The current surge has now passed last summer’s heights and continues increasing as extreme heat forces Americans indoors and precautions have largely been abandoned.
Everyone over the age of six months should get the updated Covid booster, which is expected in coming weeks, the CDC says.
But knowledge and uptake of new boosters has flagged. Only 22.3% of adults and 14.9% of children in the US are up to date on vaccines.
Even for those who want the new boosters, finding them can be a challenge – especially in summer months, when pharmacies and physicians may be wary of ordering new shots only to discard them when the new booster rolls out in the fall.
Leigh Anne Riedman, a mother of four in Santa Barbara, California, has been searching for vaccines for her children to no avail. It has been a few months since they had Covid, and she wants them to be protected during this summer surge, especially as they head back to school next week – but she has had no luck.
“There’s not the usual clinics that were there at the beginning where you would just drive up and get the shot. For the pediatric shots, you have to make the appointment at the doctor’s office,” she said.
“And they just flatly said, ‘We don’t have any and we won’t have any until we get the ones in September. We don’t know when that’s going to be, but start calling back in September to get an appointment.’”
Next, she started searching the websites of local pharmacies, including major ones like CVS, Walgreens and Rite Aid.
Getting younger kids vaccinated can be particularly complicated; major pharmacies will not vaccinate children under a certain age, such as three years or 18 months.
Riedman’s kids are 11, 15, 16, and 18, but she still was unable to find any vaccination appointments at local pharmacies.
“They didn’t have any of it,” she said. “One of them was saying that I could drive about an hour to get the shot.”
Even vaccines.gov no longer lists open vaccine appointments. The CDC will add a pharmacy locator tool once the new boosters are available, according to a message on the site.
“It’s a flashback to the beginning days,” Riedman said, when vaccines first came out and she would constantly refresh websites hunting for an appointment.
Now, she will be sending her kids back to school at the peak of a major outbreak without the protection of recent vaccination. She hopes to snag an appointment in September. Whether the kids receive last season’s booster or this season’s shot doesn’t matter to her so much as getting it quickly.
For other people, the issue may not be availability, but knowledge of when boosters come out and how long protection lasts.
“We live in a confused maze of Covid vaccine understanding,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. A major part of the problem, he said, was that the US has adopted the annual vaccination strategy of a virus like the flu or RSV – but Covid has, from the beginning, fallen into a year-long transmission pattern.
“We’ve not set up our vaccines that way,” Osterholm said. “What we have to do is get away from this idea that you could [only] vaccinate for Covid in the late fall, early winter.”
Especially those at risk, including people over the age of 65 and those with medical conditions, must get vaccinated twice a year in order to prevent serious illness, hospitalization and deaths, he said.
Two of Riedman’s children have medical conditions, and one of her kids was hospitalized with Covid in the past. She desperately wants to avoid that again. Her kids will wear masks this fall, but she’s worried they are at higher risk the longer they wait for vaccines.
“It feels very much like you’re just cut loose and you’re on your own these days,” she said.
It reminds her of earlier in the pandemic, when there was a long wait for Covid vaccines to be approved for children: “It felt like people were playing fast and loose with the health of these kids.”
Osterholm, in Minnesota, was able to get another Covid booster for himself. “I know I won’t be able to get the new Flirt variant vaccine, the mRNA [shot], for four months now, but the peak is right now,” he said.
He called for greater investment in vaccine research and development, as well as manufacturing capacity, which would strengthen the Covid response and improve future responses to other emerging viruses.
Without that, Osterholm said, “we’re less prepared today than we were in 2019 for pandemic response.”
