- The number of COVID-19 cases is decreasing, but experts aren’t sure why.
- About 12 percent of people in the United States have had at least one vaccine dose, but that alone wouldn’t explain why cases have dropped so drastically.
- The end of holiday get-togethers may be one reason why cases have continued to drop to their lowest levels since October in the United States.
Recent data shows that COVID-19 cases are finally decreasing after a winter surge that claimed thousands of lives and overwhelmed intensive care units across the United States.
Experts aren’t sure why the number of cases is dropping, but there are likely several contributing factors behind the recent dip.
Vaccinations in the most at-risk groups could be helping, and many of the people who engage in behaviors that make them susceptible to COVID-19 may have already been exposed to the virus.
If they got COVID-19 during one of the previous waves, they may have some degree of immunity.
Mostly, though, experts suspect the holiday season contributed to uncontrolled transmission. And now that the seasonal gatherings are behind us, COVID-19 isn’t spreading quite as rapidly.
“If we’re not having these big family gatherings, no holidays, anything like that, I think the opportunity to spread has decreased from that societal part as well as the biological part of people having immunity from the few people who have been vaccinated and the large amount of people who have actually caught coronavirus,” said Chris Thompson, an associate professor of biology at Loyola University Maryland’s Department of Biology.
The recent dip doesn’t mean we are in the clear. Cases could pick back up anytime, especially as new variants take hold.
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Source: healthline