Hospitalizations for Covid-19 in the United States are declining after reaching record levels this month – a welcome sign that the winter push may finally subside. But because new, potentially more contagious variants of the virus are spreading, coronavirus modelers warn that the US is by no means out of the woods.
The emergence of new variants is not entirely surprising, but experts believe that without a better understanding of how these strains affect things like transmissibility and the effectiveness of existing vaccines, it is difficult to know how the pandemic could play out.
“There’s so much in the air, and the new variant has thrown a big monkey wrench into our ability to model things,” said dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, a professor of medicine and director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of Alabama, said. in Birmingham. “All of this makes the crystal ball very cloudy.”
Although hospitalizations and the number of new infections in the U.S. have both decreased compared to the previous seven days, deaths in Covid-19 are still increasing. The country surpassed 400,000 deaths this week and set a daily record on Wednesday, with 4,131 reported deaths, according to an NBC News report.
It is estimated that the coronavirus has undergone thousands of mutations since it was detected in humans. Many were ultimately insignificant, but scientists are concerned about any changes that could make the virus contagious or make the available vaccines less effective.
Evidence from the UK has shown that one such variant, known as B.1.1.7, spreads more easily from person to person, although it does not seem to make people sicker and appears to be susceptible to vaccinations. A report released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week said the UK variant could become the dominant strain by March.
New variants have also been reported in South Africa, Brazil and the USA, with a flurry of research characterizing the changes. Early laboratory experiments suggest that the vaccines made by Pfizer and BioNTech and by Moderna may be less effective compared to the variant identified in South Africa, but the research has not been done in humans, and the findings have yet to be determined by the peer be judged.
As variants emerge, it is crucial to adhere to measures to slow the spread of the virus and to increase the rate of vaccinations so as not to increase all these figures, said coronavirus model Alessandro Vespignani, director of Northwestern University’s Network Science Institute said.
This is because a more contagious variant is likely to result in more cases, giving the healthcare systems that are already overloaded even more strain.
“It’s a bit of a race against the emergence of new tribes that are more transferable,” Vespignani said. “If we roll out the vaccine fast enough and keep the epidemic levels low, it will slow down the variant and give us more time.”
The distribution of vaccines was problematic, and some countries no longer had supplies, while others struggled to administer all the doses they received.
And there are concerns that the U.S. is not doing enough to detect genetic changes in the virus by sequencing genetic codes. The fact that he does not specifically know which variants occur in the country makes it more difficult to protect those at risk, said former CDC official Ali Mokdad, a professor of global health at the University of Washington . It also makes it a challenge for modelers to project how the pandemic could unfold.
“If we do not keep abreast of what is circulating, we could have a homemade variant that is more communicable than the one we have seen in the UK, and we will not know it,” he said.
Mokdad is part of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, which has developed one of the most cited coronavirus models. The current projection shows that although the number of new infections in the US is declining, Covid-19 deaths are not expected to reach them until early March.
Mokdad said there are still ways the US can avoid additional spikes in hospitalizations and deaths, even with the emergence of new variants.
“We need to do what we know is effective – take social distance and wear a mask,” he said. “We can not celebrate prematurely, because if everyone assumes that the worst is behind us, then we will see peaks again.”
And although models expect deaths to rise in a few more weeks, it is possible to flatten the curve if people remain vigilant, Vespignani said.
“Every prediction is not a deterministic outcome,” he said. “We can do something to change the trajectory.”
