The United States has officially recorded more than 100 million COVID-19 cases. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated late Thursday, the U.S. hit the milestone as of Dec. 21.

This makes America the first nation to report total cases in the nine-figure range, data from Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center shows.

Dr. John Brownstein, an epidemiologist and chief innovation officer at Boston Children's Hospital and an ABC News contributor, said that while the 100 million mark is momentous, it's also a severe undercount. "Obviously it's a milestone that signifies the sheer amount of transmission that has occurred around this virus and the population burden that we have faced," he said. "At the same time, we recognize that reported cases are absolutely a massive undercount -- at the beginning of the pandemic where testing was nonexistent to the shift to home testing where a significant proportion of cases has gone unreported." There are likely several reasons for underreported cases including people testing at home and not relaying their results to public health officials, not knowing where to get tested or people choosing not to test at all.

Dr Brownstein said there is likely a COVID surge that occurred after Thanksgiving that we don't know the true burden of yet, with a surge likely to occur after Christmas and upcoming New Year's.

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At least 8 million people in the US now have long COVID. That number may actually be much higher. According to the CDC, at least 1 in 13 Americans, or almost 10% of people who have previously contracted COVID-19, have developed long COVID. Some statistics say this may even be one in 4 of the recovered cases over the age of 60.

However, Long COVID effects all age groups from children on up. "It can be anywhere from patients who are critically ill in the hospital who required ventilation … down to patients who may have been mild at first, treated at home, felt flu-like symptoms and never really got over those initial symptoms. So it is really a broad spectrum." Long COVID has created a generation of people with disabilities.

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For the past several months, Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 have dominated COVID-19 cases in the U.S. But now, there’s a class of new COVID subvariants on the rise and one in particular is getting plenty of attention. It’s called XBB—or Gryphon—and there’s a chance it could overtake everything else out there. XBB is getting a lot of buzz because it spreads fast—and seems to be able to evade immunity that people have built up from having a previous COVID-19 infection or getting the vaccine, says William Schaffner, M.D., an infectious disease specialist and professor at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.

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Recent studies have indicated that the updated bivalent COVID-19 booster https://pbase.com/britestar/image/173161115 performed poorly against BQ.1.1, with even a weaker antibody response against XBB. Against a backdrop of a rapidly mutating virus, a group of FDA experts is scheduled to meet next month to discuss how to update currently available COVID-19 vaccines and boosters.

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Meanwhile
Minutes from an internal meeting of the National Health Commission revealed that as many as 248 million people — nearly 18% of China’s population — came down with the virus in the first 20 days of December, with a surge that began in Beijing spreading to rural regions, Bloomberg News reported. Some 37 million may have been infected on Dec. 20 alone, the news outlet reported. The disturbing uptick is worrying medical experts and others in the US and abroad. “There will certainly be more omicron subvariants developing in China in the coming days, weeks and months, but what the world must anticipate in order to recognize it early and take rapid action is a completely new variant of concern,” Daniel Lucey, a fellow at the Infectious Diseases Society of America and professor at Dartmouth University’s Geisel School of Medicine, told Bloomberg.

2023 could offer up even more unpleasant and deadly COVID pandemic surprises for the World and for the USA.

ABC News, Prevention. Com, & Seeking Alpha.com, Bloomberg News