Increase in cases still part of the ‘first wave’
Questions over COVID-19 remain as months pass Adrianna Rodriguez and Karen Weintraub
It’s been six months since doctors discovered the coronavirus and the illness it causes, COVID-19.
Since then, the virus has sickened millions of people worldwide, shuttering businesses and tanking economies with no clear end in sight. The USA has seen more than 2 million cases and more than 115,00 deaths.
As cases level and subside in some places and rise in others, the country is beginning a summer reopening. At the same time, nationwide protests demanding racial justice after the killing of George Floyd have brought many Americans out of their homes and onto the nation’s streets.
Question: Are increasing cases in areas of the USA part of the “second wave”?
Answer: Data suggests that the first wave hasn’t ended, it’s just fluctuated since early April. About 1,000 Americans die every day.
“The pandemic isn’t like everyone in the U.S. is on one single shore experiencing a single tsunami wave followed by another one,” said Yonatan Grad, an assistant professor of immunology and infectious diseases at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “The pandemic is made up of many local epidemics, each influenced by local mitigation efforts.”
The virus will continue to spread, he said, as long as there are susceptible people. About 60%-70% of the population would need to be infected and develop immunity to the virus to prevent its spread. New York City, the heaviest hit area of the country, has reached an infection rate of almost 20%.
Experts who track diseases make an informal distinction between a “second peak” and a “second wave.”
“We expect there to be second (and third and fourth) peaks in places where physical distancing restrictions are relaxed,” said Stephen Kissler, a mathematician and postdoctoral research fellow in Grad’s lab. “Tightening up restrictions will likely reduce cases again, and then loosening them can make them rise again ... basically, as our behavior changes and the epidemic sweeps around the country, we can expect to see multiple peaks of infection.”
A second wave, he said, “usually refers to a major resurgence of cases in the autumn that could strike all parts of the country more or less simultaneously, since viral respiratory pathogens are generally more transmissible in the autumn and winter.”
Q: Did governors cause the increases?
A: Though the federal government provided guidelines to states throughout the pandemic, the Trump administration largely gave governors
See Q&A, Page 2B