There's good news on the horizon for the U.S. Covid pandemic, and promising eCOVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths are expected ...
There's good news on the horizon for the U.S. Covid pandemic, and promising eCOVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths are expected to see a 'sharp decline' by the end of July, new models from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimate.
The new report comes as President Biden set the goal of getting 70 percent of Americans vaccinated against coronavirus by July Fourth, when he also says the U.S. will hopefully be 'reopen' again.
By September, the new CDC report predicts that new weekly cases could fall to the hundreds (rather than tens of thousands) and there will be tens of new Covid hospitalizations and deaths a week, rather than thousands and hundreds.
The CDC did not provide specific figures for the number of weekly cases or deaths the U.S. will see in late-July, but the trajectory its model suggest fatalities will fall to fewer than 1,000 a week.
Reaching such low levels of Covid infections and deaths will require not only a sustained rise in the share of Americans getting vaccinated against coronavirus, but continued compliance with measures like social distancing and even masks.
On Tuesday, the U.S. recorded 40,733 new infections with a seven-day rolling average of 47,704, which is the lowest number seen since October 9, according to a DailyMail.com analysis of Johns Hopkins University data.
The figure is not only far below January's peak of about 247,000 average new cases, but also below even the July surge, when daily cases were averaging about 68,000.
The seven-day rolling average currently sits at about 723 deaths per day, which is the third-straight week that the average has been a three-digit figure.
Nearly half of the U.S. population has had a first dose of Covid vaccines, and 41 percent are fully vaccinated.
In any scenario, the CDC predicts will see another peak in Covid deaths and cases later this month, but it will likely be a fraction of the height of the earlier surges, rising to between 7,000 to 11,100 weekly fatalities in May.
The CDC's new model did not provide specific figures for the number of weekly cases or deaths the U.S. will see in late-July, but the trajectory its model suggest fatalities will fall to fewer than 1,000 a week.
But they also warn that a 'substantial increase' in hospitalizations and deaths is possible if unvaccinated people do not follow basic precautions such as wearing a mask and keeping their distance from others.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention paper included projections from six research groups. Their assignment was to predict the course of the U.S. epidemic between now and September under different scenarios, depending on how the vaccination drive proceeds and how people behave.
Mainly, it's good news. Even under scenarios involving disappointing vaccination rates, COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths are expected to drop dramatically by the end of July and continue to fall afterward.
The CDC is now reporting an average of about 350,000 new cases each week, 35,000 hospitalizations and over 4,000 deaths.
Under the most optimistic scenarios considered, by the end of July new weekly national cases could drop below 50,000, hospitalizations to fewer than 1,000, and deaths to between 200 and 300.
In the worst case scenario, the US could see another surge of of nearly a million new Covid cases a week later this month, but with high vaccination rates and reasonably good compliance with social distancing and masking, cases could fall as low as hundreds a week
The projections are probably in line with what many Americans were already expecting.
With COVID-19 deaths, hospitalizations and cases plummeting since January, many states and cities are already moving to ease or lift restrictions on restaurants, bars, theaters and other businesses and talking about getting back to something close to normal this summer.
New York's subways will start running all night again this month, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Monday suspended all local restrictions, and Las Vegas is bustling again after casino capacity limits were raised.
President Joe Biden on Tuesday set a goal of delivering shots to 70 percent of U.S. adults by July Fourth.
Such a goal, if met, would fit in with the best-case scenarios, said one of the study's co-authors, CDC biologist Michael Johansson.
Under more pessimistic scenarios, with subpar vaccinations and declining use of masks and social distancing, weekly cases probably would still drop but could number in the hundreds of thousands, with tens of thousands of hospitalizations and thousands of deaths.
All the projections trend down, illustrating the powerful effect of the vaccination campaign.
CDC scientists project that COVID-19's toll on the U.S. will fall sharply by the end of July, shortly after President Biden hopes to have 70% of Americans vaccinated, on Independence Day. CREC Academy of Aerospace and Engineering sophomore Brian Acevedo, 16, receives a COVID-19 vaccine from nurse Myra Glass, of East Hartford Connecticut
Like deaths, hospitalizations nationwide stand to fall to just tens a week, rather than thousands a day, as they still currently stand
But there's a devastating difference between the more gently sloping declines in some scenarios and the more dramatic drops in others, said Jennifer Kates, director of global health and HIV policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation.
'Each of these differences are people's lives,' said Kates, who is part of a Kaiser research team that has focused on COVID-19 and was not involved in the CDC study.
The U.S. death toll stands at more than 578,000. The CDC paper gives no overall estimate of how high the number of dead might go.
But a closely watched projection from the University of Washington shows the curve largely flattening out in the coming months, with the toll reaching about 599,000 by Aug. 1.
More than 56 percent of the nation's adults, or close to 146 million people, have received at one dose of vaccine, and almost 41 percent are fully vaccinated, according to the CDC.
Johansson said the paper is intended not so much as a prediction of exactly what's going to happen but as a way to understand how things might unfold if vaccination drives or other efforts stumble.
By September, assuming high vaccination rates and continuing use of prevention measures, the models indicate new cases could fall to just a few hundred per week and just tens of hospitalizations and deaths.
The paper also sketched out a worst-case scenario, in which cases could rise to 900,000 per week, hospitalizations to 50,000, and deaths to 10,000. That most likely would happen sometime this month, the projections said.
However, the paper´s projections are based on data available through late March, when the national picture was somewhat darker.
The CDC paper 'is already looking a little outdated, because we´ve seen cases continue to go down, and hospitalizations go down, and deaths go down,' Kates said.
Nevertheless, Johansson warned: 'We're still in a tenuous position.'
There is variation from state to state in how well vaccination campaigns are going and how fast restrictions are being abandoned, and that will probably mean some states will suffer a higher toll from COVID-19 than others in the coming months, Kates said.
'If you take the foot off the gas,' she said, 'you can really have some bad outcomes.'
The paper doesn't look past September, and scientists cannot say for sure what the epidemic will look like next fall and winter because it's not known how enduring vaccine protection will be or whether variants of the virus will prove to be a greater problem.
Like the flu, COVID-19 could increase as people move indoors in the cold weather.
'My hope is with enough people vaccinated we will be able to get to something that will resemble maybe a bad flu season,' said William Hanage, a Harvard University expert on disease dynamics who was not involved in the research. But 'it´s not going to go away. It's not going to be eradicated.'
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