Experts fear ‘4th wave,’ say now is no time to relax safeguards
Urge keeping restrictions in place against variants
The numbers of Americans falling ill with the coronavirus have started to fall, but experts warn that now is no time to ease up on safety restrictions.
The virus will naturally take advantage of any opportunity to infect people, so opening restaurants and letting people toss away their masks just gives the bug new targets. And with every new infection, the risk of a new variant, perhaps one resistant to the current crop of vaccines, grows.
infection and hospitalization rates are falling nationwide, but experts talk in dire terms about what will happen if variants of the coronavirus surge this spring.
“I’m very worried we’re letting our foot off the brakes,” said Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
The United States saw a spike in cases last spring, mainly in the Northeast; last summer in the South; and from November through January pretty much everywhere.
As the nation’s death toll from COVID-19 approaches half a million people, public health experts said they dread the possibility of a fourth wave.
“We are done with it, but it is not done with us,” said Luciana Borio, former acting chief scientist of the Food and Drug Administration.
Three state legislatures lifted mask mandates in recent days, and New York and Massachusetts eased restrictions on indoor restaurant seating in time for Valentine’s Day.
“It’s like we’re trying our best to help the virus rather than stopping it,” said Theodora Hatziioannou, a virologist and research associate professor at the Rockefeller University in New York City.
More contagious variants of the virus have raced across Europe, South Africa and Latin America. They have all arderna, rived in the U.S., and one first identified in the United Kingdom is likely to be dominant here by the end of next month, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Peter Hotez, dean for the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, said that if the infectiousness and case fatality rate for the variant known as B.1.1.7, turns out to be the same in the U.S. as it has been in the U.K., “I worry we could reach a staggering death toll by the summer and fall.”
Another variant, which originated in Southern California, has been spreading rapidly, although it’s not clear whether it’s more contagious or more dangerous.
The two vaccines available, one by Pfizer-BioNTech and the other by MoCOVID-19 appear to be effective against these variants, said Hatziioannou, who published a study on the subject.
But these variants are likely to make targeted drugs such as monoclonal antibodies less effective.
They will continue to change and eventually will evade vaccines and diagnostic tests if they keep spreading, she said.
Now is the time, she and others said, to double-down on precautions to avoid a deadly fourth wave and finally bring the virus under control.
“The best way to mitigate the threat of the strains is to control the virus,” Borio said. “And the best way to control the virus is through the public health tools we have,” like mask-wearing, handwashing, vaccination and avoiding crowds.