Health
Why the US has the highest COVID-19 death toll
The United States crossed the grim milestone of 500,000 deaths from COVID-19 on Monday, a year since announcing its first known death from the virus on February 29, 2020 in the Seattle area.
Why does the world’s leading power have the highest death toll and what lessons are American health specialists learning from the past year?
Here, infectious disease experts Joseph Masci and Michele Halpern provide answers to some of the key questions.
Masci, 70, is one of the leaders of Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, which was at the heart of New York’s epidemic.
Halpern is a specialist at the Montefiore hospital group in New Rochelle, a New York suburb where the epidemic arrived in force in February 2020.
– Why has the United States been hit so hard? –
Prior to this pandemic, the United States observed coronaviruses “from a distance,” explained Masci.
“There was SARS in Canada but very little or none in this country. There was no MERS here at all,” he said.
“There was a lot of preparation made for Ebola coming to the United States, and it never really did.
“Suddenly this (coronavirus) was a problem where the United States was the epicenter.”
Masci said it was difficult to compare the United States with other countries.
“I think smaller countries that had structured health care services had a good chance of bringing things into play quickly.
“In a country like ours, with 50 independent states, and a huge landmass, with largely a private hospital system, it is always going to be difficult to get everybody on board with one particular set of strategies,” he explained.
Masci added that Donald Trump’s administration had a “haphazard approach”, which did not help.
“The fact that hospitals were competing with each other to get personal protective equipment didn’t make sense. They had to centralize all of that very quickly and they didn’t.
“It was a struggle to try to deal with those obstacles that were put up,” he said.
Masci and Halpern rue that mask-wearing was politicized.
“It’s purely a health care issue,” said Masci, adding that it is going to be difficult for the federal government to “reframe” that message.
Halpern insists that people should not see mask-wearing as “infringing” on their freedom.
“There are other things we do routinely that you could say infringe our liberties like wearing a seatbelt or running through a red light,” she said.
According to the Johns Hopkins University tally, another 1,297 virus-related deaths were reported on Monday in the United States.
– What are the main lessons to be learned from the crisis? –
For Masci, the most important lesson was to learn how to reconfigure hospitals to make them able to cope with a sudden influx of patients.
“Now… instead of 12 hot ICU beds, you have to have 150. Where do you get them? Who do you staff on with? So now we’ve learned this lesson.” he said.
Masci said the group of public hospitals of which Elmhurst is a part found strategies to distribute the burden among NYC’s 11 public hospitals by transferring patients very quickly.
“We’ve turned from one hospital with 500 beds, to 11 hospitals with about 5,000 beds. It’s worked very nicely.”
More generally, Halpern says the pandemic has made everyone realize that “hospitals need resources.”
“You have to invest in research, but you also have to invest in hospitals, in nursing homes. They have to have enough staff, they have to have the equipment that they need and the personnel has to be happy,” she added.
The epidemic has also sharply exposed inequalities, not just in health care but also in housing, with Black and Latino communities dying in disproportionately high numbers.
“We have to look at housing, and how it can be better suited to handling future epidemics. There are others coming,” said Masci.
– Will we still be wearing masks in December? –
Vaccines are rolling out but health experts are cautious due to uncertainties surrounding the British and South African variants of the virus.
Masci says that if the variant strains don’t turn into a huge problem and once we’ve reached the point where 70-80 percent of the population is vaccinated then “there’s a good chance” we won’t wear masks anymore.
“(But) suppose these variant strains do take hold, become more of a problem, are vaccine resistant, and we’re all closing schools and putting masks and locking down again in a few months, (then) it’s a lot harder to say by December, ‘We’ll be out of the woods.’”
Halpern says it’s reassuring that the second wave was largely controlled, in New York at least.
“I have hopes that the vaccines will be effective and will tamper future waves. But it’s hard to be sure whether our vaccines will be effective in the longer term, or on new variants. I don’t think anyone knows that.
“So we have to be prepared that we’re in this for a while,” she said.
In the long term, Masci says countries must not “fall into the trap” of forgetting about the pandemic once it has passed.
“It is unnerving to think that this came without warning. It’s caused so much restructuring of everything.
“We have to have a more meticulous global search for new pathogens because we’re living in a time now where there is no, ‘Something is happening in Asia and it’s not going to happen in America.’”
The West African Society of Parenteral & Enteral Nutrition (WASPEN) has called on President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to make clinical malnutrition a national healthcare priority, warning that the crisis is growing but remains largely overlooked in Nigeria’s healthcare system.
WASPEN’s Founder and President, Dr. Teresa Pounds, made this appeal on Monday during a press conference ahead of the 2025 WASPEN Clinical Nutrition Conference, scheduled for June 17–19 in collaboration with the National Hospital Abuja.
Themed “Bridging the Gap: Integrating Hospital and Community Malnutrition Care in Developing Countries,” the event aims to foster solutions for hospital and community malnutrition.
Describing malnutrition as “the skeleton in the hospital’s closet,” Dr. Pounds emphasised the need for urgent awareness, policy reform, and collaboration among healthcare stakeholders to ensure effective hospital nutrition programs.
“Many patients in Nigerian hospitals suffer from inadequate nutritional support, leading to prolonged hospital stays, increased complications, and higher mortality rates. This issue must be addressed at the highest level,” she stated.
The press conference was attended by the management of Genrith Pharmaceuticals Limited, a major partner, led by its CEO, Chief Emmanuel Umenwa.
Call for National Clinical Nutrition Policy
Dr. Pounds, a U.S.-based specialist in critical care nutrition and a board-certified nutrition support pharmacist, urged the government to implement a national policy framework to support specialised clinical nutrition interventions. She stressed the importance of integrating mandatory nutrition screening and intervention into all healthcare facilities.
She also called on the Federal and State Ministries of Health to expand and enforce standardised clinical nutrition policies, ensure hospitals conduct structured nutrition screening for all patients, makes medical nutrition therapy accessible and affordable, and support research and local production of specialised nutritional products.
She further encouraged NAFDAC, NIPRD, pharmaceutical companies, and NGOs to collaborate on research, funding, and product development to improve hospital and community-based nutritional care.
Invest in Africa’s food markets to win the war on hunger, boost nutrition – AfDB
“We need a national framework that ensures no patient suffers due to a lack of proper nutrition,” the expert stressed.
Conference to Attract Top Medical and Policy Experts
Speaking on the upcoming conference, Dr. Pounds noted that it will bring together leading medical experts, policymakers, and healthcare stakeholders to develop strategies for addressing malnutrition.
Prominent figures expected at the event include Prof. Ali Pate, Coordinating Minister of Health (Special Guest of Honour), Nyesom Wike, Minister of the FCT (Chief Host), Prof. Muhammad Raji Mahmud, Chief Medical Director, National Hospital Abuja (Host), Prof. Audu Bala, President, Nigerian Medical Association (Keynote Speaker), Pharm. Ibrahim Tanko Ayuba, President, Pharmaceutical Society of Nigeria (Guest of Honour), and Prof. Salisu Maiwada Abubaka, President, Nutrition Society of Nigeria (Guest of Honour) admiration.
Pre-Conference Activities
Prof. Raji Mahmud, Chief Medical Director of the National Hospital Abuja, represented by the Chairperson of the Local Organising Committee (LOC), Pharm. Adesola Clara assured that the hospital has the necessary facilities and expertise to host a successful conference. He emphasised that the hospital is fully prepared for the programme.
Also, the WASPEN Central Planning Committee, led by Mrs. Ghinsel Blessing, revealed that pre-conference activities will include a hands-on training workshop on nutritional kits in hospitals, scheduled for June 16, a health walk to raise awareness about hospital malnutrition, expected to be led by First Lady Sen. Oluremi Tinubu.
With malnutrition posing a silent but deadly threat to healthcare outcomes, WASPEN hopes that the Tinubu administration will take decisive action to integrate nutrition-focused interventions into Nigeria’s health policies.
The 2025 WASPEN Clinical Nutrition Conference is expected to be a game-changer in shaping the future of clinical nutrition in Nigeria and West Africa.
Two US biotech companies say the Food and Drug Administration has cleared them to conduct clinical trials of their gene-edited pig kidneys for human transplants.
United Therapeutics along with another company, eGenesis, have been working since 2021 on experiments implanting pig kidneys into humans: initially brain-dead patients and more recently living recipients.
Advocates hope the approach will help address the severe organ shortage. More than 100,000 people in the United States are awaiting transplants, including over 90,000 in need of kidneys.
United Therapeutics’s approval, announced Monday, allows the company to advance its technology toward a licensed product if the trial succeeds.
The study authorization was hailed as a “significant step forward in our relentless mission to expand the availability of transplantable organs,” by Leigh Peterson, the company’s executive vice president.
The trial will initially enroll six patients with the end-stage renal disease before expanding to as many as 50, United Therapeutics said in a statement. The first transplant is expected in mid-2025.
Meanwhile, rival eGenesis said it had received FDA approval in December for a separate three-patient kidney study.
“The study will evaluate patients with kidney failure who are listed for a transplant but who face a low probability of receiving a deceased donor offer within a five-year timeframe,” the company said.
Xenotransplantation — transplanting organs from one species to another — has been a tantalizing yet elusive goal for science.
Early experiments in primates faltered, but advances in gene editing and immune system management have brought the field closer to reality.
Pigs have emerged as ideal donors: they grow quickly, produce large litters, and are already part of the human food supply.
United Therapeutics said trial patients would be monitored for life, assessing survival rates, kidney function, and the risk of zoonotic infections — diseases that jump from animals to humans.
Currently, there is only one living human recipient of a pig organ: Towana Looney, a 53-year-old from Alabama who received a United Therapeutics kidney on November 25, 2024.
She is also the longest-surviving recipient, having lived with a pig kidney for 71 days as of Tuesday. David Bennett of Maryland received a pig heart in 2022 and survived 60 days.
The Swiss government said Thursday it aimed to overhaul its law on medically-assisted reproduction to legalise egg donations and give broader access to sperm donations.
Currently egg donations are not allowed and only married couples can access sperm donations.
The Swiss parliament has long said it wants to change that, and has asked the government with coming up with a proposal to provide broader access.
A government statement said it had “decided to completely revise the law on medically assisted reproduction in order to adapt it to the current context” and had asked the interior ministry to draft a proposed law by the end of next year.
The government said it wants to legalise egg donations in cases where a woman in a couple is infertile, as a parallel to the already legal use of sperm donations in cases of male sterility.
Bern said its priority was “the protection of donors and the welfare of the child”, stressing that “this protection cannot be guaranteed if parents resort to egg donation abroad”.
The government also said it wanted to expand access to both egg and sperm donation to unmarried couples.
After Switzerland legalised same-sex marriage in 2022, married lesbian couples have also had access to sperm donations.
But the government said the current law barring unmarried couples from access to such medically assisted reproduction was “outdated and no longer corresponds to social reality”.
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