In Alabama, deaths were more common than births last year due in part to a surge in COVID-19 infections.
NBC News reports:
“Our state literally shrunk in 2020,” state health officer Dr. Scott Harris said at a Covid briefing. He said it’s the first time in the state’s recorded history that this has happened — saying it’s never “been close” before, not even during World War II or the 1918 flu pandemic.
The gap between deaths (64,714) and births (57,641) in 2020 was 7,073, according to state data. That tally is eerily similar to the number of Alabama’s COVID-19 deaths last year: 7,182.
The New York Times provides important context:
Nationally, the birthrate declined for the sixth straight year in 2020, and some experts say the pandemic may be accelerating that trend. A study from the University of New Hampshire found that half of the 50 U.S. states had more deaths than births in 2020, compared with only five states with more deaths than births in 2019.
Public health officials in Alabama are worried that the population will shrink once again in 2021.
“We’re continuing to have double-digit numbers of deaths reported on most days … Over the past several days [we have had] typically 40 or 50 or sometimes 60 deaths a day,” Harris said.
Alabama has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the country, with just 41.27% of its population inoculated.
“This is not a surge of the young vaccinated that are six months out from their shots. This is a surge of the unvaccinated,” Dr. Kierstin Kennedy, the chief of hospital medicine at the University of Alabama Medicine, told CNN
Alabama’s hospitals have been pushed to the breaking point as patients infected with the highly transmissible delta variant filled ICUs over the summer. The number of available hospitals beds has increased in recent days – but that’s hardly cause for celebration.
“It is not because these patients are miraculously getting better and going home. It’s because they’re dying,” Kennedy told CNN about the bump in available beds.
Harris added, “We still have more patients requiring critical care than we have critical care beds … we don’t have any available [intensive care] beds in Alabama. And that’s a really challenging problem just for people with non-Covid illnesses or people who have a stroke or heart attack or a car accident today. It’s going to be very challenging to figure out where you can get critical care if you need it.”
Harris also flagged an alarming rise in COVID-19 cases among pregnant women. “We actually have, on average, for the past week about 23 pregnant women who are hospitalised with Covid,” he explained.
CNN reports:
The CDC reported that Covid-19 deaths in pregnant people in the US appear to have ticked up in August and recommends that pregnant people get the Covid-19 vaccine.
About 25.1% of pregnant people age 18 to 49 in the US had received at least one dose of a vaccine during pregnancy as of September 11, according to the CDC’s latest published data.