Philip Cheung / The New York Times / Redux
The coronavirus pandemic may be in its final stage in the U.S. But it will not be the last pandemic of the 21st century.
Since the turn of the century, SARS-CoV-2 is already the second virus to create a pandemic (the first was the H1N1 influenza in 2009) and the third coronavirus outbreak, following the first SARS crisis in 2003 and the emergence of Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome, also known as MERS, in 2012.
If the U.S. can expect roughly one global plague every 10 years, it will have to do better than it did over the past 12 months, when it shut down much of the economy to save lives but lost more than 500,000 souls anyway. In the past few weeks, I asked several scientists, epidemiologists, and other experts to tell me what they considered the foundational failure, or “original sin,” of our COVID-19 response. Was it the hemming and hawing over masks? The overly constrictive lockdowns in places that didn’t yet require them, fo
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One month ago, the CDC published the results of more than 20 pandemic forecasting models. Most projected that COVID-19 cases would continue to grow through February, or at least plateau. Instead, COVID-19 is in retreat in America. New daily cases have plunged, and hospitalizations are down almost 50 percent in the past month. This is not an artifact of infrequent testing, since the share of regional daily tests that are coming back positive has declined even more than the number of cases. Some pandemic statistics are foggy, but the current decline of COVID-19 is crystal clear.
What’s behind the change? Americans’ good behavior in the past month has tag-teamed with (mostly) warming weather across the Northern Hemisphere to slow the pandemic’s growth; at the same time, partial immunity and vaccines have reduced the number of viable bodies that would allow the coronavirus to thrive. But the full story is a bit more complex.