Significant spikes in new coronavirus cases and hospitalizations in Europe and Brazil provide a disturbing preview of what lies ahead for the United States in the coming weeks and months as the declining numbers here begin to level off.
The United States reported an average of 54,740 cases per day for the past week, a steady decline from the peak of the outbreak in January, when the daily number of cases was about five times higher. The number of daily cases is roughly where they were in mid-October, and close to the peak of the summer wave that hit Sun Belt states particularly hard.
But the steep decline that took place in February is now nearing a plateau, one that could predict another spike in cases, just as optimism about the pandemic’s course is starting to grow.
Public health experts look nervously at European countries, where an increase in the number of cases is once again putting pressure on healthcare. European countries have reported 242 cases per million inhabitants, a rate about 50 percent higher than in the United States and which has increased by about a third since mid-February.
The increase appears to be caused by spreading among young people, and by the emergence of the B.1.1.7 variant, which research shows is significantly more contagious, even in children. That begs the specter that the variant will continue to spread widely, even as older and more vulnerable people are given vaccines.
“Even if we are able to reduce the incidence of serious illness in the older population, we will pick up more in younger populations, which is exactly what we have seen in Europe,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center. for infectious disease research and prevention at the University of Minnesota.
The situation in Brazil is even more terrifying. Hospitals in all but two of Brazil’s 27 states are north of 80 percent, and more than 2,000 people die daily from COVID-19. The seven-day average of new cases in Brazil stands at 71,800, higher than ever during the pandemic.
President Jair Bolsonaro has constantly downplayed the threat of the virus. In comments last week, he told Brazilians to “stop whining” about the virus that killed more than 280,000 of his constituents.
“What is happening in Brazil is a tragedy,” said Osterholm.
That level of crisis is unlikely to return to the United States in the coming weeks, as more than 2 million people receive doses of one of three vaccines approved by the Food and Drug Administration every day. But some models are projecting a wider spread in the coming weeks, concentrated in the Upper Midwest, Northeast, and Mid-Atlantic.
Hospital visits are on the rise in Detroit, Flint and Macomb County, Michigan. Midwestern cities like Minneapolis and Chicago are likely to see spikes in the coming weeks, as will the Washington metro area and New York City, according to the PolicyLab at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Positivity numbers are on the rise in Phoenix, San Diego, Los Angeles and Las Vegas, a disturbing sign of a possible spike.
“Our country is still very much in a period of continuous COVID-19 broadcasts. While an increase in handover is somewhat expected as communities reopen, these trends are worrying and a reminder that this pandemic is far from over, ”the PolicyLab researchers wrote. “The regions of greatest concern at the moment are metropolitan areas. This is likely because they are more densely populated, making viral transmission easier and making it more difficult to achieve higher vaccination coverage at the population level. “
The race to vaccinate as many Americans as possible as soon as possible marks the first time in the entire pandemic that the United States has been at the forefront of the fight against the coronavirus. Americans are getting vaccinated faster than any country other than Chile, Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.
Americans are vaccinated per capita twice as fast as Canadians, and three times faster than the best performing European countries.
The Biden government has said it will send millions of doses of a vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University, a vaccine that has not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration, to Canada and Mexico.
In testimony before the House of Foreign Affairs Committee on Thursday, health experts told Congress that the United States must step up its multilateral efforts to end the pandemic abroad as soon as possible.
“We live in an interconnected, interdependent world, and an outbreak anywhere can quickly become an outbreak everywhere,” said Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health. “We need a strong, multiple, multilateral approach to end this pandemic by vaccinating a vast majority of the world.”
Dozens of low- and middle-income countries have not even received their first doses of vaccine, raising the terrifying prospect that uncontrolled spread could lead to new variants that could develop a more successful way to bypass the effectiveness of vaccines.
“If billions of people in low-income countries get infected with it, you’re going to spit out variant after variant that could very well compromise the integrity of our vaccines,” Osterholm warned. “These variants will keep going round and round. This is why we are not ready yet. “