COVID-19 virus may hit its stride post-holidays, experts say

WORCESTER — Coronaviruses tend to thrive in cold, dry conditions, and if all goes well on the vaccination front, that could make winter 2021 COVID-19′s last big hurrah. But how much havoc might the virus cause between now and spring?

Plenty, experts say.

“Well, we’re concerned we’re going to see another 10 percent climb in number of cases,” said Dr. Richard Ellison, an infectious disease specialist at UMass Memorial Medical Center in Worcester. “We have to anticipate that we’re going to see the same kind of increase we saw at Thanksgiving and be prepared for that possibility.”

Ellison said adding up to 200 extra patients into the UMass system in forthcoming weeks will stress resources -- especially if those patients need ICU care.

“When people are sick enough to be in the intensive care unit, it’s a long haul,” he said.

And COVID may cause problems well beyond a holiday travel surge if it does, indeed, behave similarly to other coronaviruses.

“Usually you go up to a peak and it stays that way for eight to 10 weeks,” Ellison said. “Then it begins to drop down. So usually you expect to see a four to six week time period where you’re going to have a high number of cases.”

Ellison said the hospital is preparing for a COVID trajectory similar to what they see with influenza.

“We might hope that beginning sometime in February that things will drop down again, but the next four weeks are the really critical time period for the hospitals,” Ellison added.

Come spring, it’s possible COVID might recede somewhat naturally.

“The first time we see a new virus often we can see things which are out of the normal seasons,” Ellison said. “Once we get past the first wave, usually things go back to the expected seasonality. And most of the respiratory viruses tend to get worse mid-winter.”

If conditions are cold enough, one model projects it’s possible Massachusetts could see 10,000 COVID -19 cases a day in January.

“I would consider this cold weather projection as the worst-case scenario,” said Qijun Hong, publisher of the ‘Encounter’ COVID model. Hong said it’s more likely Massachusetts will continue to see what it’s been seeing -- several thousand new cases per day through the winter.

The Encounter model makes its projections based on social interactions. And Hong said familiar patterns seem to have set in after surges of cases.

“After this huge surge, people slightly decreased activity,” he said. “But just a little.”

And clearly, not enough.

Hong does feel confident it will be a long, dark January for U.S. hospitals.

“At the national level, my projection is we will have 3,000 deaths per day throughout January,” he said.

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