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November 23, 2021 – Before the busiest days of travel of the year, COVID-19 cases increase in 40 states and territories, preparing the United States for a rough fifth tide of the pandemic.
“A significant increase in cases just before Thanksgiving is not what we want to see,” said Stephen Kisler, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow and data model at TH Chan School of Public Health at Harvard.
Kisler says he prefers to see an increase in daily cases coming 2 weeks after busy travel periods, as that would mean they can return when people return to their daily routine.
Seeing a large increase in cases before the holidays, he says, “is like pouring oil on an already raging fire.”
Vaccines were not introduced last winter as the nation prepared for Thanksgiving. COVID-19 burned from family gatherings.
But now that two-thirds of Americans over the age of 5 are fully vaccinated and booster doses are approved for all adults, will the increase in cases become a strain on our still under-stretched health care system?
Experts say vaccines do not allow people to enter the hospital, which will help. New antiviral pills are coming that seem to be able to stop COVID-19 infection in the knees, at least according to early data. An FDA panel is meeting next week to discuss Merck’s first pill app.
But they warn that the upcoming jump will almost certainly tax hospitals again, especially in areas with lower vaccination rates. And even countries where blood tests show that a significant number of people have antibodies after a COVID-19 infection have not left the forest, in part because we still don’t know how long the immunity generated by the infection can last.
“It’s hard to know how big the risk is there,” said Jeffrey Shaman, PhD, a professor of environmental health at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health who is modeling the pandemic.
“Unfortunately, we have been assessing for many weeks now that there has been an erosion of immunity,” he said. “I think it could get bad. … How bad? I’m not sure.”
Ali Moqdad, Ph.D., a professor of health metrics at the Institute for Health Indicators and Evaluation at the University of Washington, agrees.
Because there are so few studies on how long immunity from a natural infection lasts, Moqdad and colleagues suggest that the weakening of immunity after infection occurs at least as quickly as after vaccination.
Their model predicts that the average number of daily cases will peak around 100,000, with another 100,000 remaining undetected and remaining at that level until the end of January, as some states recover from their jumps and others raise money.
Although the number of daily deaths will not rise to the heights observed during the summer jump, Mokdad says their model predicts that deaths will rise again to about 1,200 a day.
“We’re almost there right now and he’ll be with us for a while,” he said. “We predict 881,000 deaths by March 1,” he said. The United States has registered 773,000 deaths from COVID-19, so Mokdad predicts another 120,000 deaths between now and then.
Moqdad says his model shows that more than half of these deaths can be prevented if 95 percent of Americans wear their masks while close to strangers.
Only about 36% of Americans wear masks all the time, according to studies. While people are moving more now, mobility is at pre-pandemic levels in some states.
“The rise you’re seeing right now is high mobility and low mask wearing in the United States,” Moqdad said.
The solution, he says, is for all adults to get another dose of the vaccine – he doesn’t like to call it a booster.
“Because they are vaccinated and have two doses, they have a false sense of security that they are protected. “We had to get ahead of him immediately and say you needed a third dose, and we were late to do it,” he said.
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