After weeks of dramatic decline, cases of COVID-19 in the United States have reached a plateau – and in some places are increasing. Authorities are sounding the alarm in hopes of averting a fourth increase in the devastating pandemic.
“We at CDC see this as a very worrying change in trajectory,” Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said at a news conference last week. Although the cases fell from their astronomical peak in early January to mid-January, the overall figures are still quite high, corresponding to the averages seen in late October, on the basis of the holiday’s sudden increase.
“Things are tenuous,” she noted. “Now is not the time to relax restrictions.”
The reverse trend may be partly due to the variant of coronavirus B.1.1.7, first identified in the UK and found to be about 40 to 50 percent more infectious than previous SARS-CoV-2 viruses. As expected, it continued to spread and is now responsible for about 10% of cases across the country, up from about 1 to 4% a few weeks ago. CDC researchers previously estimated that B.1.1.7 would become the predominant variant in the country during the month of March. At the same time, researchers are tracking other potentially worrying variants in California and New York.
“We may now be seeing the initial effects of these variants on the most recent data,” added Walensky.
According to the latest figures, cases in the US have dropped from an average of seven days on January 11 to almost 250,000 new cases per day. That average followed the record daily high of more than 315,000 cases on January 8, according to data from the CDC. Now, the seven-day average is hovering around 67,000, with more than 73,000 new daily cases recorded at the end of last week, before the weekend’s fall. But that average of 67,000 is above the beginning of last week, when it was around 63,000 to 65,000.
Worrying trend
“In fact, cases have increased in the past three days compared to the previous week,” said Walensky on Friday.
It is the first increase seen since the steep fall of mid-January. Saturday’s cases remained high, at around 70,000. Experts will be watching carefully as the trend line fluctuates this week. Even if the cases simply stabilize rather than continue to increase, they are still extremely high.
“If we reach a level of 70,000, we will be in that very precarious position that we were before the wave of decline, where anything that could disturb us could give us another wave,” said infectious disease specialist Anthony Fauci. “You know, we don’t want to be people always looking at the dark side of things, but you want to be realistic.”
Fauci and Walensky emphasized the need for continuous surveillance and health precautions with continued risk. Although vaccination efforts continue to increase – and a third vaccine has been authorized for use over the weekend – only about 15 percent of the country has received at least one dose of the vaccine so far. Vaccinations will not be implemented quickly enough to prevent a possible fourth increase.
And while a potential new outbreak may end up being driven by current variants, another outbreak would give the virus even more opportunities to mutate and become more dangerous.
“Viruses will not mutate if you don’t give them the opportunity to spread and replicate,” noted Fauci. “Therefore, public health measures are essential.”