While a winter surge of COVID-19 is now unavoidable, experts caution that the number of infections and deaths it will bring is not yet written in stone — and its magnitude depends on what we do next. Hundreds of thousands of lives may hang in the balance.
Stars and Stripes is making stories on the coronavirus pandemic available free of charge. See other free reports here. Sign up for our daily coronavirus newsletter here. Please support our journalism with a subscription. (Tribune News Service) — Temperatures are dropping, nights are growing longer, the holidays are nearing and the science is clear: The pandemic is far from over. A long, dark winter awaits. The number of new coronavirus cases in the United States each day has ballooned from less than 40,000 in early September to more than 100,000 in early November. The U.S. now confirms more cases in a single day than China has reported since the pandemic began. « We may be turning a corner, but not in a good way, » said Julie Swann, an expert in healthcare systems at North Carolina State University. But while a winter surge of COVID-19 is now unavoidable, experts caution that the number of infections and deaths it will bring is not yet written in stone — and its magnitude depends on what we do next. Hundreds of thousands of lives may hang in the balance. « Saying a surge is inevitable may sound like fatalism, » said William Hanage, an epidemiologist at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. « But just because some surge of some size is inevitable, it doesn’t mean the size is inevitable. » If the United States continues to relax social distancing restrictions and mask-wearing requirements, as many as 500,000 more Americans could die of COVID-19 between now and the end of February, according to scientists at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. That’s on top of the roughly 240,000 COVID-19 deaths the country has absorbed already. Even if we take substantial collective action, the number of deaths due to the coronavirus could top 100,000 between now and Feb.28, the IHME researchers said. « We are past the point of being able to get the virus under control, » said Christopher Murray, director of the institute and leader of the modeling work. « There is too much of it out there. » Scientists have warned for months that the virus that causes COVID-19 could be seasonal, spreading more easily in the cold winter months like influenza and the viruses that cause the common cold.
