The outbreak of COVID-19 in the United States will “get worse before it gets better” and the country will not experience “dramatic changes” until the third quarter of next year, Dr. Anthony Fauci told Washington Newsday.
In an interview with Washington Newsday, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and a member of the White House COVID-19 Task Force, said the outbreak of S. COVID-19 will not occur until the third quarter of next year: “I think the declines will begin as soon as we get into April and more people in the general population are vaccinated.
” During May, June and July, towards the end of the second quarter of 2021, I think you will see some dramatic changes towards the end of the third quarter.
Fauci noted that the country “never got out of the first wave” of the COVID 19 outbreak, Fauci explained: “I am not even speaking in waves [in describing the outbreak]. I see it more like a high background with different waves overlapping each other, as opposed to a wave that comes and goes”.
Is there hope that this virus will be brought under control? “Oh absolutely, yes. But it will get worse before it gets better, because now we have these waves that are not affected by the vaccine, at least for a few months.
“We’re not going to see that [a dramatic drop]in the next few months, because the next few months will reflect what’s happening outside and what happened a few weeks ago [in terms of the rising cases].
“If people take the vaccine, we could go a long way to see a really dramatic decline [in cases]in the second and third quarters of 2021. Then I think you will see a dramatic decrease in cases.
With COVID-19 hospitalizations skyrocketing across the country, Fauci told Washington Newsday: “It is quite conceivable that January could be the worst stage of the outbreak.
“I think January is going to be horrible because you’re going to overlay the Thanksgiving wave on the Christmas wave.
The daily number of cases in the country is estimated to peak on January 20, when “the distribution of vaccinations will be extended to 90 days and “governments will not impose new requirements if cases increase,” according to the latest forecast from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME).
The number of daily cases could reach about 448,000 on January 20, according to IHME, if “vaccine distribution is extended to 45 days.
Over 100,600 COVID-19 patients were hospitalized on Thursday, according to data compiled by The Atlantic’s COVID Tracking Project.
According to forecasts received by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from 12 modeling groups, “the forecasts for December 28 estimate 2,300 to 23,000 new COVID-19 hospital admissions per day.
“Four national forecasts predict a likely increase in the number of new hospital admissions per day over the next four weeks, one forecast predicts a likely decrease, and four forecasts are uncertain about the trend or predict stable numbers.
“Forecasts at the state level also show a high degree of variability due to several factors. Forecasts for hospitalizations use different data sources for COVID-19 cases or deaths with different limitations and make different assumptions about social distance,” according to a CDC report published on Wednesday.
The broader picture
The novel coronavirus has infected more than 65.4 million people since its first report in Wuhan, China.
More than 1.5 million people have died worldwide and more than 42 million have recovered by Friday, according to Johns Hopkins University.
The chart below, provided by Statista, shows the distribution of COVID-19 deaths among the U.S. population.
The chart below, provided by Statista, shows the number of current COVID-19 hospitalizations in the U.S.
