U.S. Coronavirus Cases Are Falling, but Variants Could Erase Progress

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

CHICAGO — In recent days, coronavirus cases have been dropping steadily across the United States, with hospitalizations falling in concert. But health officials are growing increasingly concerned that quickly circulating variants of the virus could cause new surges of cases faster than the country is managing to distribute Covid-19 vaccines.

Public health experts likened the situation to a race between vaccination and the virus’s new variants — and the winner will determine whether the United States is approaching a turning point in its battle against the coronavirus, now entering a second year.

“We’re definitely on a downward slope, but I’m worried that the new variants will throw us a curveball in late February or March,” said Caitlin M. Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Nationwide, new coronavirus cases have fallen 21 percent in the last two weeks, according to a New York Times database, and some experts have suggested this could mark the start of a shifting course after nearly four months of ever-worsening case totals.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/us-coronavirus-cases-are-falling-but-variants-could-erase-progress/ar-BB1d00GX?li=BBnb7Kz

[SWBTATTReg]

1. Eh, why are cases falling first of all, before speculating on these new CV variants...are they ...

falling due to increased mask use, social distancing, or both? Could the population already have been exposed to the CV in such massive numbers and thus, not as many people are catching the CV (in short, has the CV burned its way through our population?).

They are able to still ID the variants, and I thought I'd heard that current vaccine(s) can be effective against this variants (this was some time ago, new varieties of the CV could have since then, popped up, that vaccines are not effective (god, I hope not)).

[Midnightwalk]

2. Bad timing

Once the infection and death rates drop people will get sloppy about distance and masks again and governors will reopen schools, restaurants and bars.

Spring break will exacerbate that.

All around the time the new strains might arrive. Biden adding quarantine for international travel and mask requirements will help.

I think the big unknown is how fast production can be increased. I’m looking forward to getting better information on that with numbers. I fully expect the Biden administration to provide those details.

[Silent3]

3. The big problem with not getting a pandemic under control quickly...

...is that there's so much more opportunity for a pathogen to mutate.

I still think we'll get rates down a lot, but we might need one or two rounds of updated vaccines to get things fully under control.

We could even end up needing updated annual vaccines for a while, like yearly flu shots.