Situation analysis of Covid status --Experts comment on present and future

Deaths from Covid-19 in the United States are the lowest they’ve been since March 2020, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s data tracker. Case rates have similarly plummeted, though infections have become harder to track because of the widespread availability of at-home rapid tests; many of the monitoring systems that were set up at the beginning of the pandemic have also been wound down.

Is this finally the beginning of the end of the pandemic, or just another spring ebb before a new variant initiates a summer wave? (For the past two years, numbers have fallen between March and June, before rising in July.) The New York Times spoke with epidemiologists and infectious disease experts to gauge how they’re thinking about this particular juncture in the pandemic — what the risk is right now, what precautions they’re continuing to take, who is still getting severely ill and dying, and what the future may bring.

Spring reprieve

Experts agree that the risk from Covid-19 right now is low, and spring 2023 feels different from previous years.

“We’ve reached a stage of stability where people are making choices to return their lives to something closer to normal,” said Dr. Robert Wachter, the chair of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. “And I think that makes sense. Cases are relatively low; deaths are relatively low.”

The biggest reason for this improvement is that virtually everyone in the United States has some form of immunity now, whether from vaccines, a previous infection or both. Medications like Paxlovid have also significantly reduced the risk of serious illness.

Dr. Taison Bell, an infectious disease physician at the University of Virginia, said that in his intensive care unit, “we will see an occasional Covid-19 case, but we’re not seeing a lot of cases that are leading to people being on the ventilator.” Now, most of the people Dr. Bell is treating for Covid are older and either have pre-existing conditions that compromise their immune systems or lung function, or they haven’t been vaccinated. It’s essential, he said, that people who are at high risk for severe infection get a bivalent booster if they haven’t already (a second dose was also recently authorized for this group).

Another reason things are different this spring is that there have been no new, game-changing variants — “no new Greek letters,” as Dr. Wachter put it — for the last year and a half. Variations of Omicron that have some immune-evading properties, such as the current dominant strain, XBB.1.5, have emerged, but Paxlovid and vaccines are still effective against them.

Despite the good news, experts are still taking some precautions. Because while the numbers are headed in the right direction, roughly 100,000 Americans are still being infected with Covid-19 every week, and more than 150 are dying from the infection every day.

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