Ahead of holiday season, experts eye another COVID winter
by Joseph Choi - 10/26/22 6:00 AM ET
Falling coronavirus case levels and the absence of major restrictions might lead many to assume that this holiday season could be the first “normal” one seen since the start of the pandemic, but experts and stakeholders foresee another COVID-19 winter as the specter of the pandemic refuses to dissipate.
National COVID-19 cases have held at low levels since a July peak fueled by the BA.5 omicron subvariant, with the weekly number of cases currently standing at about 261,000. Hospitalizations and deaths have similarly continued to trend downwards.
Cases could, however, rise again as temperatures drop, vaccination rates stagnate and countries across the Atlantic experience a surge of their own, which has routinely foretold what will happen in the U.S.
“I wish I had a crystal ball,” Lin Chen, director of the Mount Auburn Travel Medicine Center and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, told The Hill.
“In the U.S., our cases have been declining overall, but then there are areas where the virus detection in a wastewater is increasing,” Chen said.
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https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/3703859-ahead-of-holiday-season-experts-eye-another-covid-winter/
