COVID Rates Are Up in What Experts Are Calling a “Silent Surge” Across the U.S.
“There’s a good chance that a lot of people are going to get sick in the next couple of weeks,” one expert predicted.
Rates of coronavirus across the U.S. are increasing at higher levels than usual, an unexpected surge that is leading some health experts to state that the COVID-19 pandemic is “still ongoing.”
By all measures of the virus, COVID rates are rising rapidly, with notable increases in test positivity, emergency room visits and hospitalizations in general, as well as deaths and wastewater monitoring indicators. What’s worse, only one-fifth of Americans have received the latest round of boosters for coronavirus.
Rates appear to be increasing as more people have been gathering for end-of-year holiday celebrations without taking proper precautions to guard against COVID. Trends for the virus began to shift at the start of December, just after the Thanksgiving holiday, with rates steadily increasing up to the week of December 21.
Those trends are likely to continue: A forecasting model for COVID estimates that an individual attending a Christmas gathering of 10 people has a 1 in 8 chance of COVID exposure. For a person who traveled on a plane of 100 people to reach their holiday destination late last month, that likelihood of exposure increased to a 3 in 4 chance.
“There’s a good chance that a lot of people are going to get sick in the next couple of weeks and be unaware of it,” said Michael Hoerger, professor at Tulane University School of Medicine, speaking to NBC’s “The Today Show” about the matter. “Most people are not tracking CDC data, and so their only way of knowing whether we’re in a wave is if they’ve gotten sick.”
“The COVID pandemic is still ongoing. It’s still dangerous. … As this new administration comes about, everyone in public health and in public health communication has to be just exceedingly clear” that COVID is still a threat, said Yale School of Public Health biostatistician Jeffrey Townsend, speaking to The Guardian about the rising rates.
Unfortunately, the incoming Donald Trump administration — most notably, Trump’s nominee to become head of the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — is unlikely to heed these warnings.
Kennedy specifically has pushed a number of falsehoods and conspiracy theories relating to coronavirus, including conspiracy theories based on racism. Kennedy once claimed, for example, that COVID targets “Caucasians and Black people” and that the “most immune” people to the virus were “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
Kennedy has also peddled the lie that COVID-19 vaccines are unsafe and ineffective, despite trustworthy data repeatedly showing the opposite is true. By pushing these falsehoods, Kennedy and the Trump administration could do significant harm to the American populace.
“If RFK has a significant influence on the next administration, that could further erode people’s willingness to get up to date with recommended vaccines,” former Surgeon General Jerome Adams said last fall. “I am worried about the impact that could have on our nation’s health, on our nation’s economy, on our global security.”
