{"id":3456,"date":"2023-05-02T17:12:38","date_gmt":"2023-05-02T22:12:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/?p=3456"},"modified":"2023-05-02T17:15:07","modified_gmt":"2023-05-02T22:15:07","slug":"will-covids-spring-lull-last","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/2023\/05\/02\/will-covids-spring-lull-last\/","title":{"rendered":"Will COVID\u2019s Spring Lull Last?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Atlantic<\/a> By all official counts\u2014at least, the ones still being tallied\u2014the global situation on COVID appears to have\u00a0essentially flatlined<\/a>. More than a year has passed since the world last saw daily confirmed deaths tick above 10,000; nearly a year and a\u00a0half<\/em>\u00a0has elapsed since the population was pummeled by a new Greek-lettered variant of concern. The globe\u2019s most recent winters have been the pandemic\u2019s least lethal to date\u2014and the World Health Organization is\u00a0mulling lifting its COVID emergency declaration<\/a>\u00a0sometime later this year, as the final pandemic protections in the United States prepare to disappear. On the heels of the\u00a0least-terrible winter since the pandemic\u2019s onset<\/a>, this spring in the U.S. is also going \u2026 kind of all right. \u201cI am feeling less worried than I have been in a while,\u201d Shweta Bansal, an infectious-disease modeler at Georgetown University, told me. That sense of\u00a0phew<\/em>, though, Bansal said, feels tenuous. The coronavirus\u2019s evolution is not yet predictable; its effects are\u00a0nowhere near benign<\/a>. This might be the longest stretch of quasi-normalcy that humanity has had since 2020\u2019s start, but experts can\u2019t yet tell whether we\u2019re at the beginning of post-pandemic stability or in the middle of a temporary reprieve. For now, we\u2019re in a holding pattern, a sort of extended coda or denouement. Which means that our lived experience and scientific reality might not match up for a good while yet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is, to be fair, reason to suspect that some current trends will stick. The gargantuan waves of seasons past were the rough product of three factors: low population immunity, genetic changes that allowed SARS-CoV-2 to skirt what immunity did exist, and upswings in behaviors that brought people and the virus into frequent contact. Now, though, just about everyone has had some exposure to SARS-CoV-2\u2019s spike protein, whether by infection or injection. And most Americans have long since dispensed with masking and distancing, maintaining their exposure at a consistently high plateau. That leaves the virus\u2019s shape-shifting as the only major wild card, says Emily Martin, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of Michigan. SARS-CoV-2 could, for instance, make another evolutionary leap large enough to re-create the Omicron wave of early 2022\u2014but a long time has passed since the virus managed such a feat. Tentatively, carefully, experts are hopeful that we\u2019re at last in a \u201cperiod that could be kind of indicative of what the new normal really is,\u201d says Virginia Pitzer, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Yale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Top American officials are already gambling on that guess. At a conference convened in late March by the Massachusetts Medical Society, Ashish Jha, the outgoing coordinator of the White House COVID-19 Response Team, noted that the relative tameness of this past winter was a major deciding factor in the Biden administration\u2019s decision to let the U.S. public-health emergency lapse. The crisis-caliber measures that were essential at the height of the pandemic, Jha said, were no longer \u201ccritical at this moment\u201d to keep the nation\u2019s health-care system afloat. Americans could rely instead primarily on shots and antivirals to keep themselves healthy\u2014\u201cIf you are up to date on your vaccines and you get treated with Paxlovid, if you get an infection, you just don\u2019t die of this virus,\u201d he said. (That math, of course, doesn\u2019t hold up as well for certain vulnerable groups, including the elderly and the immunocompromised.) The pharmaceuticals-only strategy asks much less of people: Going forward, most Americans will need to dose up on their COVID vaccines only once a year in the fall,\u00a0a la seasonal flu shots<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Making sweeping assessments at this particular juncture, though, is tough. Experts\u00a0expect\u00a0<\/em>SARS-CoV-2 cases to take a downturn as winter transitions into spring\u2014as many other respiratory viruses do. And a half-ish year of relative quietude is, well,\u00a0just a half-ish year of relative quietude<\/em>\u2014too little data for scientists to definitively declare the virus seasonal, or even necessarily stable in its annual patterns. One of the most telling intervals is yet to come: the Northern Hemisphere\u2019s summer, says Alyssa Bilinski, a health-policy researcher at Brown University. In previous years, waves of cases have erupted pretty consistently during the warmer months, especially in the American South, as people flock indoors to beat the heat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Continue reading The Atlantic<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Atlantic By all official counts\u2014at least, the ones still being tallied\u2014the global situation on COVID appears to have\u00a0essentially flatlined. More than a year has passed since the world last saw daily confirmed deaths tick above 10,000; nearly a year and a\u00a0half\u00a0has elapsed since the population was pummeled by a new Greek-lettered variant of concern. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":3457,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":false,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/Screenshot-2023-05-02-at-18.10.22.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3456"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3456\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3458,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3456\/revisions\/3458"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3457"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}