NEW HAVEN, Conn. (WTNH) – It became official today with the CDC declaring that the United States reached the one million milestone for COVID-19 deaths.
“It’s been very, very hard on this country, I think, in part because we just don’t have that health care infrastructure to really support people through the pandemic. And of course, we have the political divisiveness around, you know, things like vaccines that ended up hurting people,” says Yale Medicine physician F. Perry Wilson.
Dr. Wilson believes home testing and other factors are contributing to the number of COVID-19 deaths being undercounted.
“I imagine at this point, if you look at the wastewater levels if you look at hospitalization levels, we’re probably missing around fivefold of cases. If all tests were being reported and because some people don’t even test, I think we might be missing as many as tenfold of the cases,” explains Dr. Wilson.
Doctors everywhere are watching the COVID-19 surge in North Korea, where leader Kim Jong Un has blasted officials over slow medicine deliveries and ordered a military response to deal with the one point two million people there sick with a fever and few covid tests.
“There are 26 million people in North Korea. Every one of those infections is the potential for a new variant that could cause worse disease. And so I think the situation North Korea has to remind us that protecting ourselves through covid means, we really do have to reach out and try to reduce cases around the world,” says Dr. Wilson.