US, Britain could see rapid omicron drop
Experts say COVID variant could be running out of people to infect
Scientists are seeing signals that COVID-19’S alarming omicron wave might have peaked in Britain and is about to do the same in the U.S., at which point cases could drop dramatically.
The variant has proved so wildly contagious that it may already be running out of people to infect, just a month and a half after it was first detected in South Africa.
“It’s going to come down as fast as it went up,” said Dr. Ali Mokdad, professor of health metrics sciences at the University of Washington.
But experts warn that much is still uncertain about the next phase of the pandemic. The plateauing or ebbing in the two countries is not happening everywhere at the same time or pace. Weeks or months of misery still lie ahead for patients and overwhelmed hospitals even if the drop-off comes.
“There are still a lot of people who will get infected as we descend the slope on the backside,” said Lauren Ancel Meyers, director of the University of
Texas COVID-19 Modeling Consortium, which predicts that reported cases will peak within the week.
Janet Woodcock, acting head of the Food and Drug Administration, told Congress on Tuesday that the highly transmissible strain will infect “most people” and that the focus should turn to ensuring critical services can continue.
“I think it’s hard to process what’s actually happening right now, which is: Most people are going to get COVID, all right?,” she said. “What we need to do is make sure the hospitals can still function – transportation, other essential services are not disrupted while this happens.”
The University of Washington’s influential model projects that the number of daily reported cases in the U.S. will crest at 1.2 million by Jan. 19 and will then fall sharply “simply because everybody who could be infected will be infected,” according to Mokdad.
In fact, he said, by the university’s complex calculations, the true number of new daily infections in the U.S. – an estimate that includes people who were never tested – has already peaked, hitting 6 million on Jan. 6.
In Britain, new COVID-19 cases dropped to about 140,000 a day in the last week, after skyrocketing to more than 200,000 a day earlier this month, according to government data.
Numbers from the U.K.’S National Health Service this week show coronavirus hospital admissions for adults have begun to fall, with infections dropping in all age groups.
Kevin Mcconway, a retired professor of applied statistics at Britain’s Open University, said that while COVID-19 cases are still rising in places such as southwest England and the West Midlands, the outbreak may have peaked in London.
The figures have raised hopes that the two countries are about to undergo something similar to what happened in South Africa, where in the span of about a month the wave crested at record highs and then fell significantly.
Dr. David Heymann, who previously led the World Health Organization’s infectious diseases department, said Britain was “the closest to any country of being out of the pandemic,” adding that COVID-19 was inching towards becoming endemic.
Differences between Britain and South Africa, including Britain’s older population and the tendency of its people to spend more time indoors in the winter, could mean a bumpier outbreak for the country and other nations like it.