How’s that for a clickbait headline?
Infectious disease experts think the light they see ahead is not the one you are supposed to walk into, reports CNN:
“I think if we do it right, we’re going to have a 2022 in which Covid doesn’t dominate our lives so much,” said Dr. Tom Frieden, who was director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under President Obama and is now the CEO and president of Resolve to Save Lives.
Christopher J L Murray of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle concurred last week in The Lancet. He explains, “The unprecedented level of infection suggests that more than 50% of the world will have been infected with omicron between the end of November, 2021 and the end of March, 2022.” The Omicron variant is a scourge, but a fading one:
The impacts of future SARS-CoV-2 transmission on health, however, will be less because of broad previous exposure to the virus, regularly adapted vaccines to new antigens or variants, the advent of antivirals, and the knowledge that the vulnerable can protect themselves during future waves when needed by using high-quality masks and physical distancing. COVID-19 will become another recurrent disease that health systems and societies will have to manage.
The recent death toll among SARS-CoV-2 patients resembles a bad flu season in the northern hemisphere. Murray’s prognosis?
“The era of extraordinary measures by government and societies to control SARS-CoV-2 transmission will be over,” Murray writes. “After the omicron wave, COVID-19 will return but the pandemic will not.”
Still, deaths continue to rise. Hopsitals in many parts of the country are still feeling the strain. But in parts of the country the peak seems to have been reached even as records are shattered (New York Times):
“It’s important for people to not be like, ‘Oh, it’s over,’” said Aubree Gordon, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan. “It’s not over until we get back down to a lull. We’re not there yet.”
More than a quarter of all U.S. Covid-19 cases have been logged in the past month, CNN’s report continues:
What the next part of the pandemic looks like and when it will get there are what Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, an epidemiologist and infectious disease specialist at Stanford Medicine, and experts at federal agencies, academic colleagues and local public health leaders spent the holidays trying to figure out.
There was a general consensus among the experts about what happens next: “We really don’t know exactly,” Maldonado said.
There are disease models and lessons from pandemics past, but the way the highly infectious Omicron variant popped up meant the scientists’ proverbial crystal ball got a little hazy.
How hazy? If the end of the pandemic is near, how near?
The next four-to-six weeks are still going to be rough, says Dr. John Swartzberg, an expert in infectious diseases and vaccinology and clinical professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley’s School of Public Health.
Swartzberg believes March through spring or into summer will be like last year, with a continued decline in the number of cases. “There will be a sense of optimism, and then we will be able to do more things in our lives,” Swartzberg said. “I think May or June is going to really look up for us. I’m quite optimistic.”
Don’t shop for a new grille for that 4th of July cookout just yet.