Health

CDC study: 6-month COVID outlook promising...maybe

BOSTON — Pandemic? What pandemic? A new study suggests COVID-19 cases should dramatically drop in the U.S. by July, but the outlook for fall could be dependent on vaccination rates and the degree of use of non-pharmaceutical interventions.

The study, a composite of six COVID-19 models, appears in the latest edition of the CDC publication Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR).

“There’s pretty much universal agreement across scenarios and across models that things look pretty good once we get to around September,” said study co-author Dr. Justin Lessler, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University.

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What happens between now and then, though, is crucial, Lessler said.

“All the models agree that, under certain scenarios, we could see significant resurgences,” he said. “When we were running this model, [the] vaccine was still a little on the supply-limited side. People were wanting appointments and couldn’t get them. Now we seem to be on the demand-limited side.”

Vaccine inventories are high, appointments plentiful.

“This is a new disease,” said study co-author Dr. Katriona Shea, a biology professor at Penn State University. “A year and a half ago, we didn’t even have this on our radar. So clearly there’s a lot we don’t know.”

What is known is that non-pharmaceutical interventions, such as mask-wearing and social distancing, as the study notes, are important ways to keep the virus in check. And yet, as vaccine rates are dropping, more state and local governments seem to be easing up on such things as mask mandates and gathering limits.

This may be triggering premature euphoria.

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“This light at the end of the tunnel is getting brighter by the day,” said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist and professor of medicine at Vanderbilt University. “That’s wonderful. But the virus is not going to disappear. It will be still with us and probably for years to come.”

Something to keep in mind, come July, if those models are right.

“I think we need to learn from the fact that we saw a dip last summer, and Europe has seen dips in the past, and it’s come back when we let our guard down too quickly,” Dr. Shea said.

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