Significant increases in new cases of coronavirus and hospitalizations in Europe and Brazil provide a worrying preview of what the United States faces in the coming weeks and months, as the staggering number of cases here begins to decline.
The United States reported an average of 54,740 cases per day over the past week, a steady decline from the peak of the outbreak in January, when the daily number of cases was about five times higher. The daily number of cases is about where it was in mid-October, and close to the peak of the summer boom that hit Sun Belt states in particular.
But the sharp drop that took place during February is now close to a plateau, one that could predict another rise in cases just as optimism over the course of the pandemic begins to take hold.
Public health experts are watching European countries nervously, with the increase in cases again hampering health care systems. European countries reported 242 cases per million inhabitants, a rate about 50 percent higher than the United States and one that has climbed by about a third since mid-February.
The increase appears to be driven by distribution among younger people, and by the emergence of the B.1.1.7 variant that studies show, it is significantly more contagious, even among children. This gives rise to the specter that the variant will spread widely, even if older and more vulnerable doses are vaccinated.
“Even if we are able to reduce the number of cases of serious diseases in old age, we will pick up more in younger populations, which is exactly what we have seen in Europe,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the center. for research and prevention of infectious diseases at the University of Minnesota.
The situation in Brazil is even more frightening. Hospitals in all 27 countries except two from Brazil are north of the 80 percent capacity and more than 2,000 people die daily due to COVID-19. Brazil’s seven – day average new cases are 71,800, higher than at any point during the pandemic.
President Jair Bolsonaro has consistently underestimated the threat posed by the virus. In remarks last week, he urged Brazilians to “stop whining” about the virus that has killed more than 280,000 of its voters.
“What is happening in Brazil is a tragedy,” Osterholm said.
That crisis is unlikely to return to the United States in the coming weeks, as more than 2 million people receive daily doses of one of the three vaccines approved by the Food and Drug Administration. But some models project more distributed in the coming weeks, concentrated in the Upper Midwest, the Northeast and the Mid-Atlantic.
Hospital visits are increasing in Detroit, Flint and Macomb County, Michigan. Midwestern cities like Minneapolis and Chicago are likely to see spikes in the coming weeks, as well as the Washington metro area and New York City, according to the PolicyLab at Philadelphia Children’s Hospital. Positivity rates are rising in Phoenix, San Diego, Los Angeles and Las Vegas, a worrying sign of a potential increase.
‘Our country remains very strong in a period of sustained COVID-19 transmission. Although an increase in transmission is expected as communities begin to reopen, these trends are worrying and a reminder that this pandemic is far from over, “the PolicyLab researchers wrote.” The areas currently most affected “Attention is drawn to metropolitan areas. This is probably because they are more densely populated, which facilitates the transmission of virals and makes it more difficult to achieve higher vaccination rates at the population level.”
The race to vaccinate as many Americans as quickly as possible is the first time in the entire pandemic that the United States is at the forefront of the fight against the coronavirus. Americans are vaccinated faster than any other country except Chile, Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.
Americans are vaccinated twice as fast as per Canadian, and three times faster than the best-performing European countries.
The Biden administration has said it will send millions of doses of a vaccine approved by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford, not approved by the Food and Drug Administration, to Canada and Mexico.
In a testimony to the Foreign Affairs Committee, health experts told Congress on Thursday that the United States must step up its multilateral efforts to end the pandemic overseas as soon as possible.
“We live in a deeply interconnected, interdependent world, and an outbreak everywhere can quickly become an outbreak anywhere,” said Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health. “We need a powerful, multiple, multilateral approach to end this pandemic by vaccinating a vast majority of the world.”
Dozens of low- and middle-income countries have not even received their first doses of vaccine, creating the alarming prospect that uncontrolled distribution could lead to new variants that could be a more successful way to evade vaccine efficacy.
“If you have billions of people in low-income countries who become infected with this, then you will spit out the variant after the variant that could very well challenge the integrity of our vaccines,” Osterholm warned. ‘These variants are just going to keep turning. This is why we are not done yet. ”