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New coronavirus cases are on the decline in the United States after impressive peaks after the holidays last month, but experts say it’s too early for new COVID-19 vaccines to have an impact.
The positive trend is also not guaranteed to continue, as new, more transmissible variants threaten to reverse it, according to Dr Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“Although we have seen a drop in cases and admissions and a recent slowdown in deaths, cases remain extraordinarily high, still twice as high as the maximum number of cases over the summer,” she said declared this week.
The drop in cases is likely due to natural depression after record-breaking trips followed by indoor holiday gatherings triggered an increase in infections, said Dr Sarita Shah, associate professor at the Rollins School of Public Health of the ‘Emory University.
According to the Transportation Security Administration, the agency screened 1.9 million travelers on Christmas Eve, setting a pandemic record.
“We’ve seen these rises and falls in the number of COVID cases now a few times and they really seem to follow holidays or people’s movements,” Shah said.
Symptoms of COVID-19 take between two to 14 days to appear after exposure, and cases peaked exactly two weeks after the Christmas break, noted Brittany Baker, undergraduate program coordinator and clinical assistant professor at North Carolina Central University.
During this peak, the United States began reporting more than 200,000 new cases per day. Baker said Americans may have been afraid to take more precautionary measures against COVID-19, which could have contributed to the current decline.
“When we start to read in general public that the numbers are going up, we have a feeling of hindsight,” she said.
Dr Wafaa El-Sadr, professor of epidemiology and medicine at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, said the drop in the number of cases cannot be attributed to the COVID-19 vaccine because not even a tenth of the American population has not been vaccinated. According to the CDC.
And it’s unclear when the vaccine rollout, which began in December, will start to show up in declining cases.
Experts say forecasts keep changing, as more drugmakers like Johnson & Johnson seek emergency clearance from the Food and Drug Administration, the Biden administration tries to get more doses of Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, and states are expanding vaccine eligibility to speed up. deployment.
“We are vaccinating our most vulnerable populations right now, but once we start getting into the big population, the population that is running the numbers … that’s when we will start to see an impact on the overall numbers,” he said. Shah said.
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She said Americans could start to see the impact of the vaccine on the number of cases as early as the summer, but it will be more evident in the fall.
Health experts also need to know more about how the vaccine is preventing the spread of COVID-19 before knowing how it will affect the number of future cases, El-Sadr said.
Dr Anthony Fauci, the country’s leading infectious disease expert, told a CNN town hall last week that evolving evidence shows it could prevent asymptomatic transmission, but there is no definitive evidence yet. It is possible that a person is exposed, has no symptoms, and still has enough virus in the nasal pharynx to infect someone else.
Protecting yourself from people without symptoms is critical, as a CDC study in early January found that asymptomatic cases accounted for more than half of all transmissions, El-Sadr added.
“We want to make a dent in preventing asymptomatic infections,” she said. “We want to protect people from disease in order to control the epidemic.”
Follow Adrianna Rodriguez on Twitter: @AdriannaUSAT.
Patient health and safety coverage at USA TODAY is made possible in part by a grant from the Masimo Foundation for Ethics, Innovation and Competition in Healthcare. The Masimo Foundation does not provide editorial contributions.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: COVID cases in US are on the decline, but not yet due to vaccine, experts say
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