Five years later, COVID-19 cases in Maryland top 1.5 million, health department reports

Yahoo

05-02-2025

Confirmed COVID-19 cases in Maryland this week passed the 1.5 million mark, five years after the virus was first found in the state. (Adobe Stock photo)
Nearly five years after COVID-19 was declared a public health emergency in the United States, the number of cases detected in Maryland has topped 1.5 million, according to the latest data from the state Department of Health.
According to data updated Tuesday, the state had recorded 1,500,501 total cases since March 4, 2020. The state also reported 18,290 COVID-19 deaths in that same span.
Andrew Pekosz, professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who researches COVID-19 and other respiratory illnesses, speculates that the 1.5 million cases milestone likely occurred several months ago.
'These days, so many people either don't test for COVID-19 or they use a home test and don't report those results,' he said. 'These are the official diagnosed numbers – that have 1.5 million – but I'm sure we blew past that many months ago because so many cases are now mild enough that people don't even feel the need to test, let alone seek out any kind of health care resources for their illnesses,' he said.
But even as the state hits that milestone, today's COVID-19 is less severe than in the height of the pandemic.
The World Health Organization declared COVID-19 to be a public health emergency on March 11, 2020, and the disease has shifted significantly since then. Vaccines are now available and there are much lower hospitalization rates and deaths from COVID-19.
Meanwhile, most of the federal emergency funds and support for states are no longer available.
Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director for the American Public Health Assocation, wouldn't say that the pandemic is over, but that it's shifting.
'The way people are thinking about it is it has moved to a next phase. It's still around the whole world, so it's still definitely a pandemic, you can still get it,' Benjamin said. 'But the good news is that it isn't mutating as readily as it was before.
'It's reached endemic proportions,' he said. 'Think flu — the flu is an endemic disease, it's around all the time.'
Pekosz also referred to COVID-19 as 'endemic.'
'I think we've firmly seen the transition of COVID-19 from a pandemic into an endemic disease – meaning a disease that we know we're going to be dealing with on an annual basis,' he said.
'What we hope we'll see is a transition to it also being seasonal disease. One of the things that really differentiates COVID-19 from virtually all other respiratory afflictions is that we see cases all year round,' Pekosz said.
When it comes to tracking COVID-19 cases in the United States, epidemiologists use computational modeling to tease out the actual presence of COVID-19 in the country and in Maryland. But even as COVID-19 remains a dangerous virus, health officials are not seeing the number of cases, deaths and hospitalizations reach the heights that occurred in 2021 at the peak of the pandemic.
According to the Maryland Health Department, the highest number of daily cases reported was on Dec. 28, 2021, with 17,252 new cases reported in the state that day, when the total number of cases to date had reached 680,351 cases. A few weeks later, on Feb. 25, 2022, the state would pass the 1 million cases mark.
The most recent data shows that there were 1,305 cases reported just this week and just under 4,500 cases for the month of January.
The record number of daily deaths due to COVID-19 was recorded on Jan. 18, 2022, when 80 Marylanders died from COVID-19. The most single-day deaths last year, by comparison, was 17 on Feb. 2, 2024, and there were nine deaths this week. Lower numbers, but they show that COVID-19 is still a deadly disease, especially for those over age 55 and those with underlying health conditions.
About 94% of COVID-19 deaths in Maryland are among those aged 50 and older, even though that age group only makes up about a third of total cases, according to the Maryland Health Department's data.
'It's important to target, even more strongly, messaging toward those in vulnerable parts of the population — individuals … with medical conditions that predispose them to severe influenza,' Pekosz said. 'Because when you look at the hospitalized population, they are primarily elderly, they have secondary medical conditions — and many of them haven't had a vaccine in over a year.'
But recent actions at the federal level concern public health experts like Benjamin.
Over the weekend, there were reports that datasets and webpages from websites such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were offline and showing error messages. When some of the pages reappeared on Sunday, there were messages saying that the CDC's website was being modified to comply with recent executive orders from President Donald Trump.
Benjamin says that weakened communications from federal health agencies will slow the health system's ability to respond to emerging health needs, such as potential changes in COVID-19 or if a new pandemic arises.
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'The fact that the federal government is taking down websites and screwing around with the data reporting systems, that means that for a lot of these infectious diseases, including COVID, we're flying – I don't want to say blind, but we're much less knowledgeable than we need to be,' he said. 'I fear that something bad could start transmitting itself in our communities, and we wouldn't know about it until we would be chasing an outbreak.'
Pekosz agreed that slowing down health communications could weaken the ability to respond to new threats.
'The faster you respond, the more likely you are to successfully fight an outbreak,' he said. 'Problems with communication, problems with sharing data, all slow down that process of making us aware of what's going on in the situation. And that's not a good thing.'