What will the pandemic look like this summer?
Cases expected to rise; crushing wave less likely
The past two pandemic summers saw a spike in COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths, but this season may be different.
Though health experts expect cases to rise, they said the wave won’t be as devastating as the previous two summers or the surge of the omicron variant of the coronavirus.
Unlike during the summers of 2020 and 2021, most of the U.S. population has some immunity against the coronavirus from vaccines, boosters and previous infections. People have access to antivirals that can prevent hospitalizations in the unvaccinated.
However, immunity wanes, and new variants could evade what protection remains.
“I know we all want to be done with COVID, but I don’t think it’s done with us,” said Dr. Jessica Justman, associate professor of medicine in epidemiology and senior technical director of ICAP at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.
Coronavirus trends in the spring give experts clues about what to expect this summer. Cases plummeted after the omicron surge in the winter, then plateaued and began to rise again in the spring.
A USA TODAY analysis of Johns Hopkins data shows the pace of cases doubled in April compared with the month prior to about 54,000 per day. The average pace of deaths fell to 327 per day, about half of the level at the end of March.
The month ended with 17,288 COVID19 patients in the hospital, not far above March’s ending of 16,032.
Though the unpredictable coronavirus makes it difficult to pinpoint what the summer will look like, experts have a few theories.
The worst-case scenario is the emergence of a potent variant that isn’t dulled by vaccines and previous infections, causing a large wave of cases, hospitalizations and deaths.
“A full surge over the summer is going to be really dependent on a variant fully emerging. That tends to be the biggest trigger that will send us into a surge,” said Dr. Keri Althoff, professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “Those transmissible variants are good at finding pockets of unvaccinated people, and those people are more at risk of hospitalization and death.”
The best-case scenario is a sustained level of low transmission and no new variants.
Julie Swann, a professor and public health researcher at North Carolina State University, said she expects the situation this summer to land in the middle: a small wave throughout the country with a slight uptick in hospitalizations and deaths.
Areas likely to be most affected by this swell are ones not heavily affected by the omicron variant where people haven’t mounted immunity protection.
“I expect this next wave to be much smaller than the one we had in January,” Swann said. “In the U.S., there are communities that have had less exposure to this virus, and so (they will) likely have a large impact from the virus in the next few weeks and months.”