Dr. Anthony Fauci has a sobering prognosis: “It will get worse.”
The White House senior medical advisor made these remarks amid rising Covid cases across the country, largely due to the newly dominant and more transmissible Delta variant of the virus, during an interview with ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday. Although it is hard to imagine a situation worse than the current surge in the country, “we are seeing some pain and suffering in the future as we see cases increase,” said Fauci.
Delta has run rampant across the US for the past few weeks, surpassing the peak of new daily cases last summer, and particularly hard hit the country’s relatively large population of unvaccinated people – 50% on Thursday afternoon. Experts believe the US needs a 90% vaccination rate to achieve herd immunity because Delta can spread rapidly.
If that doesn’t happen, Fauci told McClatchy DC on Wednesday, the virus will continue to spread through the fall and winter – giving it “sufficient chance” to develop another, worse variant.
So how bad is “worse”? Here’s what could happen in the coming months, and what can be done to stop it:
New (and worse) variants could mean booster shots
As long as a virus can spread, it can mutate and create more dangerous variants. And while the Covid vaccines used seem to work well against current variants, “there might be a variant lingering out there that Delta can push aside,” Fauci told McClatchy.
If a more vaccine-resistant variant shows up, people might need a booster shot. Countries like Israel, Germany and France have already started giving third doses of mRNA vaccines as boosters – although the World Health Organization said on Wednesday that it is too early to move forward with boosters until vaccine inequalities around the world are addressed are.
“We’re talking about boosters in countries that have access to vaccines,” Keri Althoff, epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told CNBC Make It At the time do not have access to the first dose. “
Most of the virus’ current ability to spread in the US – which has an abundant supply of vaccines – is due to America’s large population of unvaccinated people. About 30% of the adult population in the United States have not received at least one dose, and about 33% of eligible children ages 12-17 have not yet received a vaccination.
New data from the CDC has also raised concerns about breakthrough cases where people who have been vaccinated can occasionally pass the Delta variant on to others. The CDC only tracks breakthrough cases that lead to severe hospital admissions and deaths, but most breakthrough cases are usually mild or asymptomatic – leading some experts to believe that the agency provides important real-time data on their prevalence and ability to promote new variants could be missing.
“The concern has to be that something new will develop, call it epsilon or some other variant, and we have to watch this very closely,” Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, vice province for global initiatives and co-director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Health Transformation Institute, said Tuesday in a briefing with the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
“If you miss breakthrough infections, you are unfortunately missing a development here that would be very important to us,” said Emanuel.
The cases could rise to 100,000 or 200,000 a day
A key indicator that Covid will continue to deteriorate, Fauci said: The nation’s seven-day average for new daily cases is currently rising.
“Remember, a few months ago we had about 10,000 cases a day,” Fauci told McClatchy. “I think you’re likely to land between 100,000 and 200,000 cases.” The average is currently above the peak last summer before vaccines were approved and used. The seven-day moving average of daily cases on August 2 was 84,389, according to data from the CDC. Last year, the CDC reported about 68,700 new cases per day.
There is evidence that the increase is motivating people to get vaccinated. Louisiana, which has the highest rate of Covid cases per capita, has quadrupled the number of people who have been vaccinated in the past few weeks.
But even with this shot of vaccination, people are not considered “fully vaccinated” for a while. The CDC defines “fully vaccinated” as two weeks after the second dose of a two-dose regimen such as Moderna or Pfizer, or two weeks after receiving the Johnson & Johnson single-shot vaccine. “Even if we all vaccinate today, we won’t see any effect until mid to late September,” Fauci told McClatchy.
Social distancing and restrictions could come back
Last year’s full lockdowns are unlikely to return as the country’s vaccine supplies are strong and experts now know more about how Covid is spreading, Fauci told ABC. But as long as vaccines aren’t available to everyone – like school-aged children, for example – non-pharmaceutical preventive measures like masking and social distancing may return.
In late July, the CDC withdrew its mask guidelines for fully vaccinated individuals, recommending everyone wear masks in indoor public spaces in counties where “significant or high transmission” occurs, as noted by the agency’s data tracker. Masks are also a good idea in areas with high vaccination rates, Althoff said, to prevent breakthrough cases and dampen further transmission.
“Masking protects you and others, and with a truly portable variant, indoor masking is very important right now,” she said.
Restrictions on large indoor and outdoor gatherings could also return – because while canceled parties and two meter high markings in stores are certainly impractical, they could help prevent more restrictive measures.
“Nobody wants to go back to what we had before with the lockdowns,” said Althoff.
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