South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
As US virus case numbers fall, variants could erase progress
In recent days, coronavirus cases have been dropping steadily across the United States, with hospitalizations falling in concert. But health officials are growing increasingly concerned that quickly circulating variants of the virus could cause new surges of cases faster than the country is managing to distribute COVID-19 vaccines.
Public health experts likened the situation to a race between vaccination and the virus’s new variants — and the winner will determine whether the United States is approaching a turning point in its battle against the coronavirus.
“We’re definitely on a downward slope, but I’m worried that the new variants will throw us a curveball in late February or March,” said Caitlin Rivers, a public health researcher at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Nationwide, new coronavirus cases have fallen 21% in the last two weeks, according to a New York Times database, and some experts have suggested this could mark the start of a shifting course after nearly four months of ever-worsening case totals.
This week, the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which puts out a predictive model that is widely used for planning, including by some government agencies, released a projection saying new cases in the United States would decline steadily from now on.
“We’ve been saying since summer that we thought we’d see a peak in January, and I think that, at the national level, we’re around the peak,” said Dr. Christopher Murray, director of the institute.
Still, Murray cautioned that variants of the virus could “totally change the story.”
Health officials warned that they have little foresight into what the rest of the winter and spring will bring. President Joe Biden’s new administration has vowed to impose speed and order to what has been a slow and bumpy rollout of vaccinations, in which some 15 million people have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. But it is not clear how many vaccines will be available in cities across the country in the coming weeks. The public should still wear masks, officials say, avoid large gatherings and sign up to be vaccinated as soon as they are eligible.
Thirty-seven states are seeing sustained reductions in cases, with only one reporting significant increases. Arizona and California, which reached disastrous new case records in recent weeks, have reported noticeable drops over the past several days.
Still, the country continues to average nearly 190,000 new cases each day, more than any point of the pandemic before December. Deaths from the coronavirus are still extraordinarily high, with more than 4,300 deaths announced Wednesday, the second-highest daily total of the pandemic. And in some places, there has been no progress at all.