https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/14/health/coronavirus-delta-surge.html?referringSource=articleShare
“It’s a combination of immunity, but also people being careful,” said Joshua Salomon, an infectious disease expert and modeler at Stanford University.” “It’s not likely that it will be as deadly as the surge we had last winter, unless we get really unlucky with respect to a new variant,” Dr. Salomon said.”
After a brutal summer surge, driven by the highly contagious Delta variant, the coronavirus is again in retreat.
The United States is recording roughly 90,000 new infections a day, down more than 40 percent since August. Hospitalizations and deaths are falling, too.
The crisis is not over everywhere — the situation in Alaska is particularly dire — but nationally, the trend is clear, and hopes are rising that the worst is finally behind us.
Again.
Over the past two years, the pandemic has crashed over the country in waves, inundating hospitals and then receding, only to return after Americans let their guard down.
It is difficult to tease apart the reasons that the virus ebbs and flows in this way, and harder still to predict the future.
But as winter looms, there are real reasons for optimism. Nearly 70 percent of adults are fully vaccinated, and many children under 12 are likely to be eligible for their shots in a matter of weeks. Federal regulators could soon authorize the first antiviral pill for Covid-19.
“We are definitely, without a doubt, hands-down in a better place this year than we were last year,” said Dr. Nahid Bhadelia, director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases Policy and Research at Boston University.
But the pandemic is not over yet, scientists cautioned. Nearly 2,000 Americans are still dying every day, and another winter surge is plausible. Given how many Americans remain unvaccinated, and how much remains unknown, it is too soon to abandon basic precautions, they said.
“We’ve done this again and again, where we let the foot off the pedal too early,” Dr. Bhadelia said. “It behooves us to be a bit more cautious as we’re trying to get to that finish line.”
Crushing the curve
When the first wave of cases hit the United States in early 2020, there was no Covid vaccine, and essentially no one was immune to the virus. The only way to flatten the proverbial curve was to change individual behavior.
That is what the first round of stay-at-home orders, business closures, mask mandates and bans on large gatherings aimed to do. There is still debate over which of these measures were most effective, but numerous studies suggest that, collectively, they made a difference, keeping people at home and curbing the growth of case numbers.
These policies, combined with voluntary social distancing, most likely helped bring the early surges to an end, researchers said.