New cases of coronavirus are declining in the United States after the incredible highs after holidays last month, but experts believe it is too early for new COVID-19 vaccines to have an impact.
The positive trend also cannot continue, as new and more transferable variants threaten to reverse it, according to dr. Rochelle Walensky, Director of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“Although we have seen a decline in cases and surveys and a recent slowdown in deaths, cases remain exceptionally high, still twice as high as the highest number of cases during the summer,” she said this week.
The decline in cases is likely due to a natural depression after record trips followed by indoor holiday gatherings caused an increase in infections, Drs. Sarita Shah, associate professor at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health, said.
According to the Transportation Security Administration, the agency selected 1.9 million travelers the day before Christmas Eve to set a pandemic record.
“We’ve seen these ups and downs in the COVID case a few times now, and it seems like it’s really following holidays or people’s movements,” Shah said.
It takes between two and fourteen days before exposure to COVID-19 occurs, and the cases peak exactly two weeks after the Christmas break, said Brittany Baker, an undergraduate program coordinator and clinical assistant professor at North Carolina Central University, noted.
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During that peak, the U.S. reported more than 200,000 new cases a day. Baker said Americans may have been afraid to take more precautions against COVID-19, which could contribute to the current decline.
“When we as a general public start reading that numbers are rising, we have a sense of retreat,” she said.
Dr Wafaa El-Sadr, professor of epidemiology and medicine at the Columbia University School of Public Health, said the declining numbers could not be attributed to the COVID-19 vaccine, as not even a tenth of the American population has not been vaccinated. According to the CDC.
And it is not clear when the explosion of the vaccine, which began in December, will appear in declining case numbers.
Experts believe that the forecast continues to change as more drug manufacturers, such as Johnson & Johnson, request emergency authorization from the Food and Drug Administration, the Biden administration seeks more doses of Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, and declares that the vaccine is eligible come to speed up faster. deployment.
“We are currently vaccinating our most vulnerable population, but once we start migrating into the broad population, the population will forward the numbers … then we will see an impact on the overall numbers,” Shah said.
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She said Americans can already see the impact of the vaccine on case numbers in the summer, but it will be clearer in the fall.
Health experts also need to know more about how the COVID-19 vaccine spreads before they know how it will affect future numbers, El-Sadr said.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s leading expert on infectious diseases, said in a CNN town hall last week that evidence shows that it can prevent asymptomatic transmission, but there is no definitive evidence yet. It could be that someone is exposed, shows no symptoms and still has enough virus in the nose pharynx to infect someone else.
Protection against people who do not show symptoms is essential, as a CDC study in early January found that asymptomatic cases account for more than half of all transmissions, El-Sadr said.
“We want to take a dive into preventing asymptomatic infection,” she said. “We want to protect people from disease to control the epidemic.”
Follow Adrianna Rodriguez on Twitter: @AdriannaUSAT.
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This article originally appeared in the US today: US COVID cases fall, but experts believe it is not yet of vaccine