By Jennifer Rigby and Julie Steenhuysen
LONDON/CHICAGO (Reuters) – As the third winter of the coronavirus pandemic looms in the northern hemisphere, scientists are warning governments and others tired of preparing for additional waves of COVID-19.
In the U. S. alone, there may be as many as a million infections per day this winter, Chris Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), an independent modeling organization at the University of Washington that is tracking the pandemic, told Reuters. That would be about double the existing count.
Across the UK and Europe, scientists predict a series of COVID surges as other people spend more time indoors during the colder months, this time with almost no masks or social distancing restrictions.
However, while it’s possible that cases will return in the coming months, deaths and hospitalizations are unlikely to pile up with the same intensity, Mavens said, with the help of vaccination and booster campaigns, past infections, milder variants and the availability of highly effective COVID treatments.
“The other people at maximum threat are the ones who have never noticed the virus, and there is almost no one left,” Murray said.
These forecasts raise new questions about when countries will emerge from the COVID emergency phase and enter a state of endemic disease, where communities with the highest vaccination rates will see smaller outbreaks, most likely on a seasonal basis.
Many experts had predicted that the transition would begin in early 2022, but the arrival of the highly mutated Omicron variant of the coronavirus has disrupted expectations.
“We want to put aside the concept of ‘is the pandemic over?'” said Adam Kucharski, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. .
“Someone once told me that the definition of endemism is that it gets a little worse,” he added.
The potential wild card remains a new variant that will emerge and overtake the dominant Omicron subvariants lately.
If this variant also causes more severe disease and is greater in evading past immunity, this would be the “worst-case scenario,” according to a recent European report by the World Health Organization (WHO).
“All scenarios (with new variants) imply the possibility of a large long-term wave at a point as bad or worse than the epidemic waves of 2020/2021,” the report says, in the style of Imperial College London.
CONFUSING FACTORS
Many disease experts interviewed via Reuters said it’s much more complicated to make predictions for COVID, as many other people rely on immediate home tests that aren’t reported to government health officials, masking infection rates.
BA. 5, the Omicron subvariant that is lately causing an increase in infections in many regions, is highly transmissible, so many patients hospitalized for other illnesses can test positive and be counted as severe cases, even if COVID-19 is not the source. of their anguish.
The scientists said other unknowns complicating their predictions are whether a combination of vaccination and COVID infection, so-called hybrid immunity, provides greater coverage to people, as well as the effectiveness of booster campaigns.
“Anyone who says they may be waiting for the long term of this pandemic is overconfidence or a liar,” said David Dowdy, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Experts are also closely following developments in Australia, where a resurgent flu season combined with COVID is overwhelming hospitals. They say it’s conceivable that Western countries will see a similar trend after several quiet flu seasons.
“Let’s put ourselves in position for a smart flu season,” said John McCauley, director of the World Influenza Center at the Francis Crick Institute in London.
The WHO said each and every country still wants to take new waves with all the equipment in the pandemic arsenal, from vaccines to interventions, such as testing and social distancing or masking.
The Israeli government recently halted COVID testing of travelers at its foreign airport, but is in a position to resume the practice “in a few days” on the occasion of a sharp increase, said Sharon Alroy-Preis, the country’s director of public health. Department.
“When there’s a wave of infections, we have to put on masks, we have to check ourselves,” he said. “It’s living with COVID. “
(Reporting by Jennifer Rigthrough and Julie Steenhuysen; additional reporting by Maayan Lubell; editing by Michele Gershberg and Bill Berkrot)