Why It's Too Soon to Call It Covid Season

Looking back over the previous three years, they do see patterns: a spike at some point in the summer, such as the arrival of the Delta variant in 2021, and a spike sometime in the late fall or winter, such as the Thanksgiving surge of Omicron later that year..

As we get more used to seeing this virus, our immunity builds up a little more and a little moreso the time between the winter surge and the summer surge gets longer and longer, says David Dowdy, a physician and professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health..

We know from this virus, year over year, people's immune response to each vaccine or boost starts waning at that six- to eight-month time point, says Mark Cameron, an associate professor of population and quantitative health sciences at Case Western University...

Ashish Jha, a physician who is the dean of the Brown School of Public Health and served for 14 months as the White Houses Covid-19 response coordinator, said at a media briefing last week, My expectation is we're going see a further decline for probably the next month or two, and then we're going to see the virus starting to rise again, as we get into the holidays and beyond...

Paxlovid and other antivirals, monoclonal antibodies, whatever we're using to treat Covidwed want to start ramping up production of those drugs in the late summer, so we have them around in the winter, within their shelf life, says Jacob Simmering, a health economist and assistant professor at the University of Iowas Carver College of Medicine, and coauthor of a March analysis that found reliable seasonal spikes in cases in the United States and Europe..

You might be interested in