As the third winter of the COVID-19 pandemic looms in the northern hemisphere, scientists are warning weary governments and populations to prepare for new waves of the virus.
In the United States alone, there could be as many as one million infections a day this winter, Chris Murray, head of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), an independent modeling group at the University of Washington that tracks the pandemic, told Reuters. That would be about double the current daily output.
In the UK and Europe, scientists are predicting a series of COVID waves as people spend more time indoors during the colder months, this time with almost no restrictions on masking or social distancing.
However, while cases may rise again in the coming months, deaths and hospitalizations are unlikely to rise with the same intensity, experts said, helped by vaccinations and revaccinations, previous infection, milder variants and the availability of highly effective COVID treatments .
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“The people who are most at risk are those who have never seen the virus, and there’s almost nobody left,” Murray said.
Read more: US President Biden tests positive for COVID-19 again in rare ‘ricochet’ case.
These projections raise new questions about when countries will move out of the COVID emergency phase and into a state of endemic disease, where communities with high vaccination rates see smaller outbreaks, possibly on a seasonal basis.
Many experts predicted that the transition would begin in early 2022, but the arrival of the highly mutated variant of the Omicron coronavirus shattered those expectations.
“We have to put aside the ‘is the pandemic over?'” said Adam Kucharski, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He and others see COVID becoming an endemic threat that still causes a large disease burden.
“Someone once told me that the definition of endemic is that life just gets a little worse,” he added.
The potential wild card remains whether a new variant emerges to overtake the currently dominant Omicron sub-variants.
If this variant also causes more severe disease and is better able to evade previous immunity, that would be the “worst-case scenario”, according to a recent World Health Organization (WHO) report on Europe.
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“All scenarios (with new variants) show the potential for a large future wave at a level as bad as or worse than the 2020/2021 epidemic waves,” said the report, based on a model from Imperial College London.
1:44 Experts call for caution amid summer COVID-19 surge Experts call for caution amid summer COVID-19 surge – July 23, 2022
Many of the disease experts interviewed by Reuters said that making predictions about COVID has become much more difficult because many people rely on rapid at-home tests that are not reported to government health officials, obscuring infection rates .
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BA.5, the Omicron subvariant that is currently causing a spike in infections in many regions, is highly transmissible, meaning that many patients hospitalized for other illnesses can test positive for it and be classified as severe cases. even if COVID-19 is not the source of their suffering.
Scientists said other unknowns complicating their predictions include whether a combination of vaccination and COVID infection — so-called hybrid immunity — provides greater protection for people, and how effective booster campaigns might be.
“Anyone who says they can predict the future of this pandemic is either overconfident or lying,” said David Dowdy, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Read more: Don’t wait for updated COVID-19 vaccines if you’re at high risk, experts say
Experts are also closely monitoring developments in Australia, where a renewed flu season combined with COVID is overwhelming hospitals. They say it’s possible that Western nations will see a similar pattern after several quiet flu seasons.
“If it happens there, it can happen here. Let’s prepare for a proper flu season,” said John McAuley, director of the Global Influenza Center at the Francis Crick Institute in London.
The WHO said each country still needs to approach new waves with all the tools in the pandemic arsenal, from vaccinations to interventions such as testing and social distancing or masking.
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Israel’s government recently suspended routine COVID testing of passengers at its international airport, but is prepared to resume the practice “within days” if it faces a major surge, said Sharon Alroy-Preis, head of the country’s public health service .
“When there’s a wave of infections, we have to wear masks, we have to get tested,” she said. “This is life with COVID.”
(Reporting by Jennifer Rigby and Julie Steenhuysen; Additional reporting by Maayan Lubel; Editing by Michele Gershberg and Bill Berkrot)
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