Substantial increases in new coronavirus cases and hospitalizations in Europe and Brazil offer a worrying forecast of what the United States is facing in the coming weeks and months, as the number of free-falling cases begins to stabilize.
The United States reported an average of 54,740 cases a day last week, a steady decline since the peak of the outbreak in January, when the daily case count was about five times higher. The daily case counts are more or less where they were in mid-October, and close to the peak of the summer wave that hit the states of the Solar Belt particularly hard.
But the steep decline that occurred over February is now approaching a plateau, which may portend another peak in cases, once optimism about the course of the pandemic has begun to take hold.
Public health experts are nervously watching European nations, where the rise in cases is once again putting a strain on health systems. European countries recorded 242 cases per million inhabitants, a rate about 50% higher than that of the United States and which has increased by about a third since mid-February.
The increase appears to be driven by the spread among younger people and the appearance of variant B.1.1.7, which studies show is substantially more infectious, even among children. This raises the specter that the variant will continue to spread widely, even if older and more vulnerable people receive doses of the vaccine.
“Even if we manage to reduce the number of serious disease cases in the older population, we will take more in the younger populations, which is exactly what we saw in Europe,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Prevention at Minnesota University.
The situation in Brazil is even more frightening. Hospitals in all but two of Brazil’s 27 states are north of 80% of capacity, and more than 2,000 people die daily from COVID-19. The average number of new cases in Brazil in seven days is 71,800, higher than at any time during the pandemic.
President Jair Bolsonaro has continually minimized the threat of the virus. In comments last week, he told Brazilians to “stop complaining” about the virus that killed more than 280,000 of its voters.
“What is happening in Brazil is a tragedy,” said Osterholm.
That level of crisis is not expected to return to the United States in the coming weeks, as more than 2 million people receive one of the three vaccines approved by the Food and Drug Administration daily. But some models are projected to be more widespread in the coming weeks, concentrated in the Upper Midwest, the Northeast and the Mid-Atlantic.
Hospital visits are increasing in Detroit, Flint and Macomb County, Michigan. Midwestern cities such as Minneapolis and Chicago are likely to peak in the coming weeks, as well as the Washington metropolitan area and New York City, according to PolicyLab at the Children’s Hospital. of Philadelphia. Positivity rates are rising in Phoenix, San Diego, Los Angeles and Las Vegas, a worrying sign of a potential peak.
“Our country remains in a period of sustained transmission of COVID-19. Although increases in transmission are expected as communities begin to reopen, these trends are worrying and a reminder that this pandemic is far from over, ”wrote PolicyLab researchers. “The regions of greatest concern at the moment are the metropolitan areas. This is probably because they are more densely populated, facilitating viral transmission and making it more difficult to achieve higher vaccination rates at the population level ”.
The race to vaccinate as many Americans as quickly as possible represents the first time in the entire pandemic that the United States is at the forefront of the battle against the coronavirus. Americans are being vaccinated at a faster rate than any other country except Chile, Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.
Americans are being vaccinated twice as fast per capita as Canadians and three times as fast as the best-performing European nations.
The Biden government has said it will send millions of doses of a vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford, which has not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration, to Canada and Mexico.
In a statement to the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Thursday, health experts told Congress that the United States needs to step up its multilateral efforts to end the pandemic abroad as soon as possible.
“We live in a deeply interconnected and interdependent world, and an outbreak anywhere can quickly become an outbreak anywhere,” said Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University School of Public Health. “We need a vigorous, multifaceted multilateral approach to end this pandemic, vaccinating a large majority of the world.”
Dozens of low- and middle-income nations have not even received their first doses of the vaccine, raising the frightening prospect that uncontrolled spread can lead to new variants that may develop a more successful means of preventing the vaccine’s effectiveness.
“If you have billions of people in low-income countries infected with it, that’s when you’re going to spit out variant after variant that could very well challenge the integrity of our vaccines,” warned Osterholm. “These variants will continue to spin. That’s why we’re not done yet. “