Is the Worst Over for Covid-19?
A spring wave may be in the cards, but it’s hard to say for sure. Here are the four main variables that will determine it.
Whither Covid-19? The projections rest on a few key factors, like our behavior and the spread of variants.
Photographer: Nic Coury/BloombergConfirmed cases of Covid-19 and hospitalizations from the disease have been plummeting for weeks in the U.S. and elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere. Deaths also are in decline. So it seems the long-dreaded fall-winter wave of the pandemic, which turned out to be just about as terrible as feared (with the exception that it wasn’t accompanied by much of any seasonal influenza), has finally crested.
In more good news, some quite effective Covid vaccines are now available, and after a fitful start, the U.S. effort to inject them into people’s arms is steadily gaining speed. Four times as many people are now receiving first vaccine doses each day as are being infected with the disease, according to the infections estimates of both data scientist Youyang Gu’s covid19-projections.com and the covidestim.org model assembled by researchers at the Harvard and Yale schools of public health.