WHO: Jeremy Faust, MD , Department of Emergency Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, corresponding author of JAMA paper
WHAT: The COVID-19 pandemic has led to excess deaths — a higher number of fatalities than would be expected over a given period. A new study compares excess deaths during the pandemic period when the Delta variant dominated (June 28, 2021-December 5, 2021), during the transition from Delta to the Omicron variant (December 6-26, 2021) and when Omicron dominated (December 27, 2021-February 20, 2022) in Massachusetts. Investigators found that excess deaths were higher during the 8-week Omicron period compared to the 23-week Delta period (2,294 deaths versus 1,975).
“In terms of excess death, we found that Omicron was actually much worse for Massachusetts than Delta,” said Faust. “Others have reported that the Omicron variant may cause milder COVID-19. Assuming that’s the case, what we’re seeing here may reflect just how much more infectious Omicron has been. This could mean that highly contagious variants, even if they cause relatively milder illness, can still lead to substantial excess mortality, even in a highly vaccinated population.”
JAMA
Observational study
People
Excess Mortality in Massachusetts During the Delta and Omicron Waves of COVID-19
20-May-2022
Dr Krumholz reported receiving consulting fees from UnitedHealth, Element Science, Aetna, Reality Labs, F-Prime, and Tesseract/4Catalyst; serving as an expert witness for Martin/Baughman law firm, Arnold and Porter law firm, and Siegfried and Jensen law firm; being a cofounder of Hugo Health, a personal health information platform; being a cofounder of Refactor Health, an enterprise health care, artificial intelligence–augmented data management company; receiving contracts from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services through Yale New Haven Hospital to develop and maintain performance measures that are publicly reported; and receiving grants from Johnson & Johnson outside the submitted work. No other disclosures were reported.