COVID update

Axios - Today's expiration of the COVID public health emergency cuts off a pipeline of data that tallied the pandemic's human toll and offered a view of how the stealthy virus spread, Axios' Sabrina Moreno writes. More than 1.1 million Americans died from COVID over the course of the public health emergency — about 980 people a day. The CDC will stop tracking COVID-19 at the community level, which had been part of an effort launched in March 2020 to help people gauge their infection risk.COVID deaths — seen as a lagging indicator of how fast the virus spread — peaked during the week of Jan. 13, 2021, when the U.S. was averaging nearly 3,400 fatalities per day, according to CDC data. The average now is about 158 daily COVID deaths, or about 1,100 per week.  This still places the virus as one of the leading causes of death in the U.S. and the overall death toll is the highest of any country in the world.