COVID Cases are Dropping. What Happens After Omicron?

[marmar]

(Northeastern University) The crest of the omicron wave is in the rearview mirror in the United States. Daily new COVID-19 cases have fallen to half those of the peak of the surge in mid-January. Hospitalizations—a metric that lags behind new case counts—also are declining significantly across the country.

“What we have for the next few weeks should be a decrease in activity. All of the indicators seem to go down,” says Alessandro Vespignani, director of the Network Science Institute and Sternberg Family Distinguished Professor at Northeastern. Vespignani leads a team of infectious-disease modelers that has been developing a set of projections about the possible futures of the COVID-19 pandemic since the crisis began.

If there are no surprises, Vespignani’s team projects that COVID-19 case rates should return to pre-omicron levels in March. And by late spring or early summer, he says, the U.S. and other countries in the Northern Hemisphere may be able to breathe a little easier.

....(snip)....

But that is not a certain future, and trouble could still arise before then, he says. As the emergence of the omicron variant showed, highly transmissible mutations in SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, can change the trajectory of the pandemic quickly.

“Likely there will be other bumps in the road,” Vespignani says. But “what we think is plausible is that those bumps will be less threatening.” ................(more)

https://news.northeastern.edu/2022/02/09/what-happens-after-omicron/

[dalton99a]

1. I suspect TSA will make masks optional by summer

[DetroitLegalBeagle]

3. It's currently set to expire on March 18th

I guess we will have to wait and see if they will extend it again. With all the other states dropping them now I would not be shocked if they just let it expire.

[PortTack]

2. Unfortunately there's a variant B2. we are not out of the woods yet

[BigmanPigman]

4. If the pattern continues we should have another

variant in about 4 months. Still too many unvaxxed around the world. Hopefully it will be just a "bump".

[Klaralven]

5. Pi

[Lettuce Be]

6. What happened after Delta? Oh yeah, we stopped wearing masks and then came Omicron ...

to be continued ...

[Zeitghost]

7. While not apples and oranges

The difference between then and now is apples and far fewer apples.

There were far more potential victims still left after Delta. Post Omicron, the vast majority of Americans will have been vaxxed or infected and in many cases both. Variants will continue to evolve, but the fatalities will far lower.