LONDON/CHICAGO, Aug 1 (Reuters) – As the third winter of the coronavirus pandemic approaches in the northern hemisphere, scientists are warning both weary governments and populations to prepare for more waves of COVID-19.
In the US alone, there could be as many as a million infections a day this winter, Chris Murray, head of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), an independent modeling group at the University of Washington which has been the monitoring of the pandemic. , he told Reuters. That would be about double the current daily figure.
Across the UK and Europe, scientists are predicting a series of waves of COVID, as people spend more time indoors during the colder months, this time with almost no masking or social distancing restrictions .
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However, while cases may rise again in the coming months, deaths and hospitalizations are unlikely to rise as sharply, experts said, helped by vaccination and boosts, earlier infections, milder variants and the availability of highly effective COVID treatments.
“The people who are most at risk are the ones who have never seen the virus, and there’s hardly anyone left,” Murray said.
These forecasts raise new questions about when countries will move out of the COVID emergency phase and into a state of endemic disease, where communities with high vaccination rates see smaller outbreaks, possibly seasonally.
Many experts had predicted that the transition would begin in early 2022, but the arrival of the highly mutated Omicron variant of the coronavirus disrupted those expectations.
“We have to put aside the idea of ’is the pandemic over?'” said Adam Kucharski, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He and others see COVID evolving into an endemic threat that still causes a high burden of disease.
“Someone once told me that the definition of endemic is that life just gets a little worse,” he added.
The potential wild card remains whether a new variant will emerge that surpasses the currently dominant Omicron sub-variants.
If this variant also causes more severe disease and is better able to evade previous immunity, that would be the “worst-case scenario,” according to a recent report from the World Health Organization (WHO) in Europe.
“All scenarios (with new variants) indicate the potential for a future large wave at a level as bad as or worse than the 2020/2021 epidemic waves,” said the report, based on an Imperial College model of London
CONFIDENCE FACTORS
Many of the disease experts interviewed by Reuters said that making forecasts for COVID has become much more difficult as many people rely on quick tests at home that are not reported to government health officials, obscuring the infection rates.
BA.5, the subvariant of Omicron that is currently causing infections to peak in many regions, is extremely transmissible, meaning that many patients hospitalized for other illnesses may test positive for it and be counted among severe cases, even if COVID-19 is not the source of their distress.
The scientists said other unknowns complicating their forecasts include whether a combination of vaccination and infection with COVID, so-called hybrid immunity, gives people greater protection, as well as the effectiveness of booster campaigns.
“Anyone who says they can predict the future of this pandemic is either overconfident or lying,” said David Dowdy, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Experts are also closely watching developments in Australia, where the resurgence of flu season combined with COVID is overwhelming hospitals. They say it’s possible that Western nations could see a similar pattern after several quiet flu seasons.
“If it happens there, it can happen here. Let’s prepare for a proper flu season,” said John McCauley, director of the Worldwide Influenza Center at the Francis Crick Institute in London.
The WHO has said that each country still needs to approach new waves with all the tools in the pandemic armoury, from vaccines to interventions such as testing and social distancing or masking.
Israel’s government recently halted routine COVID testing of travelers at its international airport, but is prepared to resume the practice “within a few days” if it faces a major surge, said Sharon Alroy-Preis, head of the public health service of the country.
“When there is a wave of infections, we have to put on masks, we have to get tested,” he said. “This is living with COVID.”
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Reporting by Jennifer Rigby and Julie Steenhuysen; Additional reporting by Maayan Lubell; Editing by Michele Gershberg and Bill Berkrot
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