Not even a month ago, COVID-19 cases in Massachusetts were on the decline. With vaccination well underway, health experts were cautiously optimistic about the spring months when the state – and the country – could start looking into a post-pandemic future.
In fact, cases were declining across the country, prompting governors across the country to ease restrictions – removing mask orders and reopening sectors of the economy. Massachusetts followed suit, lifting capacity restrictions in restaurants and introducing major entertainment venues, recreational facilities and sports arenas.
But in recent weeks, this general decline in cases has started to slow down. It stabilized and started to rise again.
Now, cases have been rising at a worrying rate in Massachusetts, other parts of the Northeast and Midwest. The director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Rochelle Walensky, warned this week about the “impending doom” that could result from another increase in cases – a message that arrives when millions of doses of vaccine are being administered every day.
How did we get here? Experts say it is a combination of things – states that open very early, the growth of highly infectious variants, outbreaks in schools and the so-called “COVID fatigue”, among them.
Experts have repeatedly suggested that just accelerating the rate of vaccinations will not be enough to reduce the number of cases again, noting the growing body of evidence that shows that some variants of COVID are much more infectious than other strains.
“The recent increase in cases may be due to some of these variants,” Dr. Davidson Hamer, professor of infectious diseases and medicine at Boston University School of Medicine. “There is growing evidence in the UK and the United States that they are more transmissible, which is really worrying.”
With states easing COVID restrictions in the United States – including Massachusetts – Hamer says the possibility of highly contagious variants taking root and reinvigorating the pandemic poses a real threat to progress in the vaccination effort.
“I think we are in a race against time,” he added.
The CDC data collected since the beginning of the year showed a significant growth in the so-called UK variant among the COVID-positive test samples sequenced in the USA. The most recent report of samples collected in the week of March 13 showed that more than 20% of the samples analyzed across the country were confirmed as the strain of the United Kingdom.
But due to the lack of sequencing capabilities, it is difficult to get an accurate picture of how many new cases are called “variants of concern”. Massachusetts organizations involved in genomic testing are actively looking to expand their skills, such as the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, a regional leader in the effort that is taking samples across New England.
Authorities said last month that less than 1% of COVID-positive samples in Massachusetts were being screened for variants, and national reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are lagging behind.
The Department of Public Health also acknowledged the difficulty in identifying the rapidly spreading variant, telling MassLive that it has stopped sending “individual notifications” about confirmed cases of the UK strain to cities and towns because of how widespread the most contagious strain is. to point. Local health councils can still access variant information through the Massachusetts Virtual Epidemiological Network, or “MAVEN”, and notifications about B.1.351, the South African variant, and P.1, the Brazilian variant, continue, they said. the authorities.
Dr. Michael Hirsh, a physician at the UMass Memorial Medical Center and medical director of the Worcester department of public health, said that DPH told city officials to assume that the UK variant “is everywhere.” Based on these concerns, Hirsh said he believed the state was going too fast.
“I definitely think that opening the way we are now is underestimating the potential of these variants,” said Hirsh. “I really fear that we will not have enough needles in the weapons to reach that number of collective immunity at this rate.”
The vast majority of new cases of COVID in Massachusetts continue to be handled by young people. Nearly 7,000 confirmed infections in the past 14 days have occurred in people under the age of 19; another 6,155 are in their twenties, according to the most recent state data. In comparison, just over 1,000 cases during that period were confirmed among residents over 70 years of age.
Experts say the shift in infections from elderly to young people has resulted in an increasing number of hospitalizations among younger people. The average age of hospitalized patients starting this week is 64, which is a drop from the average of 73 at the height of the crisis in January.
While the entire state is experiencing an increase in cases, some regions are being hit hardest. The average percentage of positivity at Barnstable on Cape Cod, for example, was recently as high as 7.49% – more than four times the state average. There was also an outbreak of infections among students and staff at Barnstable Public Schools, raising concerns about the safety of returning to face-to-face learning.
And with Easter in a few days, state officials are again warning residents about the ease with which respiratory infection can be transmitted indoors.
“The virus, as we know from previous holidays, has a particular opportunity to spread in these environments,” said Governor Charlie Baker on Thursday. “We saw it happen on Thanksgiving Day; we saw it happen at Christmas. “
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