Early Warning Signs Another COVID Surge May Be Coming
Nick Landekic, Guest MINDSETTER™
Early Warning Signs Another COVID Surge May Be Coming
While both the transmission rate and hospitalizations have dipped under 100, there are numbers emerging in Europe tied to a subvariant that needs to be closely watched.
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What is being seen?
It is very difficult to predict when a surge of infections is coming in a pandemic. One of the most valuable tools would be a way of forecasting when infections will increase, to give time to prepare and take measures to reduce the damage. The numbers of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are all lagging indicators that show what was happening at a point in time in the past. By the time they are increasing, a surge is already well underway and may be too late to take meaningful actions to change its course.
Deaths from COVID come several weeks after infection. Likewise, people generally need hospitalization only sometime after becoming infected. Even direct case numbers take time to test and report and also reflect what was measured at a past time point.
Though imperfect, the two best indicators to predict what is likely coming are, what is happening elsewhere in the world, and analysis of COVID virus levels in wastewater.
Cases are increasing in Europe and Asia
In previous COVID surges, increases in infections in Europe preceded surges in the U.S. In the past two weeks COVID cases have made an abrupt change in direction and started increasing quickly and substantially across Europe and Asia.
South Korea, until recently one of the best in containing the pandemic, has seen a more than 100-fold increase in daily cases. In Hong Kong people are dying faster than they can be buried, and the dead bodies are being kept in hospital wards with patients https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/11/world/asia/hong-kong-hospitals-covid.html.
During the course of the pandemic, what happening in Europe has shown to be a good predictor of what is coming to the U.S.
“Every time we followed suit within a matter of weeks,” said Dr. Eric Topol, Director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute.
Emergence of the more transmissible Omicron BA.2 variant
The Omicron BA.2 variant is displacing the original Omicron BA.1 variant and becoming predominant. In Germany BA.2 now accounts for about 50% of cases, in the U.K. over 75%, and in Denmark essentially 100% of cases. It is rapidly increasing in the U.S. and now represents about 20% of cases, up from virtually none a month ago.
While BA.2 does not appear to cause more severe disease than BA.1, being more transmissible means that at the same level of public health precautions, it will cause many more infections.
“Everyone is worn out. Everyone is exhausted. I am as well. But we lost 1,400 Americans yesterday to COVID and we’ll probably lose another 1,400 today. And I don’t think anything has happened that suggests to me that vaccine mandates and mask mandates should be lifted,” said Dr. Thomas LaVeist, Dean of Public Health at Tulane University.
Nick Landekic is a retired scientist and biotechnology executive with over 35 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry.