COVID is back. But then, it never really left. And the respiratory disease’s late-summer resurgence might be a preview of an even bigger surge this winter.
Experts say the latest bump in infections, hospitalizations, and deaths in the United States and other countries, in the fourth year of the novel coronavirus pandemic, was inevitable three years ago—when anti-science extremists all over the world began politicizing the then-brand-new vaccines.
Vaccines that, with wide enough uptake, could’ve strangled COVID and ended the pandemic as early as 2021. Instead, vaccination rates in most countries stalled out well below the 90-percent threshold necessary to produce population-level immunity.
ADVERTISEMENT
Disinformation-fueled politics kept us from ending the pandemic two years ago. And it’s still preventing us from ending it today. “We’re on an absolute collision course once again between public health messaging and politics,” said Irwin Redlener, the founding director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University and an adjunct professor of pediatrics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx.
That has left the planet with so-called “hybrid immunity:” a blend of vaccine-induced antibodies and natural antibodies from past infection that’s got a fundamental flaw. Antibodies from vaccines fade fast. And as vax-rates continue to slide, bigger and bigger gaps open in humanity’s hybrid immunity. “It is because this immunity also decays that we are observing resurgences,” said Edwin Michael, an epidemiologist at the Center for Global Health Infectious Disease Research at the University of South Florida who runs a complex simulation of COVID.
It’s these gaps COVID has exploited these past couple of years—and will continue to exploit for at least another year, according to experts. “The above pattern is also expected in 2024,” Michael said. Meaning the recent surge in infections almost certainly won’t be the last.
Many U.S. states don’t track COVID cases anymore, eliminating a major source of data that experts use to track trends as the disease spreads and evolves. But wastewater surveillance—basically, sampling sewage in order to measure the concentration of the virus—indicates the summer surge in the United States began in mid-July.
Over the next six weeks, the average concentration of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in American sewage spiked from 165 copies to 638—a fourfold increase. The spread has plateaued in recent weeks, hinting at a slowdown in transmission of the disease.
But hospitalizations lag behind infections, as it can take days or weeks for an infection to become life-threatening. The first week of September, weekly COVID hospitalizations spiked to 20,500 in the U.S.—a threefold increase over the most recent low, back in mid-June. COVID deaths in the U.S. likewise spiked in early September, peaking at more than a thousand per week. That’s double the June death rate.
The situation was similar in much of the world. The United Kingdom had a late-summer surge. So did Mexico. And while the recent spike in infections, hospitalizations and deaths is just the fifth- or fourth-worst COVID surge since the virus first made the leap from animals to people back in late 2019, experts warned that a more severe surge in infections and deaths is probably coming as the weather in the northern hemisphere cools and people crowd indoors.
Even that surge shouldn’t come anywhere close to matching the apocalyptic pathogenic waves that crashed over much of the world in January 2021 and again in January 2022. Our global immunity has gaps owing to dwindling vaccine uptake, but it’s still stronger than it was two years ago.
“Virtually the entire population has some level of immunity, either through vaccines, past infections or both,” Lawrence Gostin, a Georgetown University global health expert, told The Daily Beast. As a global population, humanity is reasonably well-protected. On an individual level, however, the risks are much different. “The risks faced by the elderly and other vulnerable populations remain significant,” Gostin pointed out.
If there’s a major reason to be hopeful, it’s that the SARS-CoV-2 virus seems to be behaving as many experts predicted it would—and evolving to become more transmissible but probably less severe. The increased contagiousness, usually resulting from changes to the virus’s distinctive spike protein—which the pathogen uses to grab onto and enter our cells—helps the virus to spread quickly from person to person, and find just enough people with weak immunity.
These unprotected souls become major incubators of the disease. Human laboratories for further viral mutations. But on the whole, these mutations are creating forms of the virus that sicken their hosts without necessarily killing them. “Let’s hope this continues,” Michael said.
From an evolutionary perspective, a nearly-perfect virus might be highly transmissible but come with a low risk of death to the host. That’s generally how the flu has evolved, and it’s why the human race usually weathers an annual flu outbreak with vaccines, rest, and chicken soup.
But James Lawler, an infectious disease expert at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, stressed that this evolution toward human-pathogenic coexistence isn’t unavoidable. “The notion that viruses inevitably evolve to become less pathogenic to humans is an unsubstantiated myth,” he said.
Redlener agreed. “The problem has always been that this [trend toward less severity] could change next week, if someone identifies some new, more virulent strain,” he said.
Still, if our luck holds, COVID could also become an annual, flu-like annoyance—and one that an individual can prevent with an annual booster for the best messenger-RNA vaccines. But probably not for a while, Michael told The Daily Beast. “There is a possibility that towards the end of 2024 the system will begin to resemble flu,” he said.
Unless and until that happens, experts’ advice is the same as always. Stay alert and stay up-to-date on your vaccines. As it happens, the latest booster shot just became available—and it works really well. “All of us are encouraged by the new booster,” Redlener said.
