- Experts say the current surge in new COVID-19 cases is unlikely to ease anytime soon.
- They say the contagious Delta variant combined with the reopening of businesses and well-attended events is fueling the surge.
- Experts predict that COVID-19 will be a part of daily life in the near future, with new variants appearing periodically.
New COVID-19 cases are averaging around 70,000 per day. Hospitalizations and COVID-19-related deaths are also on the rise.
However, some experts say we’re not yet at the peak of the current COVID-19 surge.
“I wouldn’t count on it. We’ve been surprised so many times before, and obviously the public health authorities wouldn’t have eased lockdown and opened things up most recently in the U.S. from last month if they saw this surge coming,” Dr. Dean A. Blumberg, the chief of pediatric infectious diseases at the University of California, Davis, told Healthline.
“Early on it was clear that it was activities that lead to surges. The biggest wave that we had in the U.S. was in December and January related to travel for holidays as well as it being winter, so facilitating viral transmission,” he said.
“This [current] surge is likely related to two factors: one is the easing of lockdowns, and so people have had more interactions, and every interaction is another opportunity for [a] transmission event to occur,” Blumberg said.
The other factor, he said, is the more infectious Delta variant.
Dr. Aruna Subramanian is a clinical professor of infectious diseases at Stanford University in California. She said it’s likely there will be some surges in the future, but their severity is hard to predict.
“I expect that COVID-19 is going to become endemic, so we may see little bumps of cases every now and then,” she told Healthline.
“I don’t know how much more of a full-fledged surge there will be. That really depends on whether new variants take off and how much of the world is vaccinated, and whether new variants come to us from places that don’t have access to the vaccine, or places like in the U.S. who don’t want to get vaccinated. There’s many factors to that,” Subramanian said.
“At some point it will be under control, but really it is to be seen how severe will those endemic cases be,” she added. “Will it just be like the common cold every year? Would it be more like the flu, or is it going to be more severe? That’s hard to know because it’s hard to predict how the virus will change and what variants will come about.”
Source: healthline