Where, and why, experts are still being careful

Spring reprieve

Experts agree that the risk from COVID-19 right now is low, and spring 2023 feels different from previous years.

“We’ve reached a stage of stability where people are making choices to return their lives to something closer to normal,” said Dr. Robert Wachter, the chair of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. “And I think that makes sense. Cases are relatively low; deaths are relatively low.”

The biggest reason for this improvement is that virtually everyone in the United States has some form of immunity now, whether from vaccines, a previous infection or both. Medications like Paxlovid have also significantly reduced the risk of serious illness.

Dr. Taison Bell, an infectious disease physician at the University of Virginia, said that in his intensive care unit, “we will see an occasional COVID19 case, but we’re not seeing a lot of cases that are leading to people being on the ventilator.” Now, most of the people Bell is treating for COVID are older and either have preexisting conditions that compromise their immune systems or lung function, or they haven’t been vaccinated. It’s essential, he said, that people who are at high risk for severe infection get a bivalent booster if they haven’t already (a second dose was also recently authorized for this group).

Another reason things are different this spring is that there have been no new, game-changing variants — “no new Greek letters,” as Wachter put it — for the last year and a half. Variations of omicron that have some immune-evading properties, such as the current dominant strain, XBB.1.5, have emerged, but Paxlovid and vaccines are still effective against them.

Despite the good news, experts are still taking some precautions. Because while the numbers are headed in the right direction, roughly 100,000 Americans are still being infected with COVID19 every week, and more than 150 are dying from the infection every day.

Wachter continues to wear a mask in most crowded indoor settings, like on an airplane or in a museum, he said, but not if he needs to pop into a store quickly.

His main motivation is wanting to avoid long COVID. “Unlike the way I felt two or three years ago, I have no fear that I’m going to die of this thing,” he said. “But I think long COVID is very real. My wife has a mild version of it, so I see it up close and personal.”

Caitlin Rivers, an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public