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This week, the Covid-19 vaccine studies conducted by Pfizer, BioNTech, and Moderna released positive results on vaccine efficacy in patients in the United States. These excellent results from vaccine trails deserve to be celebrated, but COVID-19 statistics in the US remain grim. Also this week, the United States reported the highest number of daily deaths from Covid-19 in six months, averaging over 150,000 new cases per day and reaching over 11.5 million total confirmed cases. According to a forecast by GlobalData, if the current trend continues, more than 100 million (30%) of the US population could contract the virus through person-to-person transmission by July 2021. Given that vaccines will take many more months to be approved, manufactured and distributed to the general population, the United States cannot rely on vaccines alone to curb the pandemic.
Covid-19 outbreaks have grown at an exponential rate in situations where precautions are not in place or are not effective. Even in a low-level transmission scenario, one hundred cases on day 1 can grow to 2,200 cases by day 14 and 45,000 by day 30. The United States has seen a significant increase in new daily cases in the past month, from about 45,000 new cases every day. cases in early October to about 150,000 new cases per day in early November. This corresponds to an increase of 0.6% in daily cases. GlobalData epidemiologists looked at the outcome of the pandemic on whether current trends continue into 2021 (Figure 1). The forecast model shows that there will be around 200,000 new cases daily by the end of December 2020 and a staggering 675,000 new cases daily by mid-July 2021.
According to an article published Oct. 21 in Nature on herd immunity, most epidemiological models have estimated that around 70% of the population will need to be immune to achieve herd immunity, where transmission cannot be sustained due to the low number of susceptible individuals. However, it is important to understand that waiting for the disease to run its course until herd immunity is achieved will result in immense suffering and many deaths. Herd immunity is a concept that was developed based on vaccine studies and has never been achieved through infections alone. This scenario also does not include any re-infections. As more reports of re-infections have been confirmed, the pandemic is likely to last even longer without effective interventions, resulting in an even higher number of total cases that will cause significant health care strain and disruption to normal life . The public must not become complacent after recent announcements on vaccine efficacy, because if the current outbreak situation is not controlled in the coming weeks, many lives will be lost before vaccines are available to the general public.
Figure 1: United States, United States, new cases per day (N) and percentage of population that is naive forecast Covid-19, February 2020-December 2021.
Credit: GlobalData; John’s Hopkins University Covid-19 database; World Health Organization Covid-19 Situation Reports.
This scenario assumes that current incidence trends will continue until the end of 2021. However, as many cities and states are initiating further lockdown measures, there is hope that the current trend will not continue. While blockages are effective in slowing the rate of infections in the short term, they are harmful to society in many other ways and cannot be sustained for long. In an article published by USE TODAY On November 18, Dr Anthony Fauci predicted that frontline health workers could receive vaccines as early as late December or January, and the general population can expect to receive vaccines by April. Vaccinated populations will be protected against disease and virus transmission and will drastically reduce the incidence of new infections. However, the United States cannot rely on blockades or vaccines alone, so the Covid-19 pandemic must be controlled using multiple strategies.
At peak speeds earlier this year, the ILI visit rate reached over 7%, significantly higher than reported in 2019 at the same time. Based on the GlobalData analysis, there were 1.39 million laboratory-confirmed incidents of influenza and over 16.6 million cases of influenza-like illness in 2019. Based on current reported data, there appear to be fewer cases of ILI than in the same period last year. However, the flu season has only just begun. With healthcare resources reduced to a minimum due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the risk of a bad flu season shouldn’t be underestimated.
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