Since the U.S. has experienced the Covid-19 peak just as Britain, the cases may begin to drop off dramatically, health scientists predict.
The prediction for the drop in the Omicron cases may have been driven by the fact that the highly contagious Omicron variant has run out of bodies to infect.
“It’s going to come down as fast as it went up,” said the professor of health metrics sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle, Ali Mokdad.
Meanwhile, experts are still concerned about the next phases of the pandemic which are yet to unfold. The ebbing that is currently happening in these two countries is not occurring in the rest of the world at the same pace. Moreover, months of misery still stand ahead of the world for the overwhelmed patients and facilities.
Researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, who have been predicting the infections and hospitalization rate due to Covid since its onset, warn that “cases may continue to climb through the month instead of dropping off should greater mitigation strategies not be put into effect”.
“New cases of near 10,000 per day are possible for Dallas County and up to 8,000 per day for Tarrant County”, UTSW Researchers say.
Meanwhile, the University of Texas Covid-19 Modeling Consortium director, Lauren Ancel Meyers, who works on Covid predictions, warns of Covid’s peak in the US within the current week.
“There are still a lot of people who will get infected as we descend the slope on the backside,” she says.
The highly influential models for Omicron cases prepared by The University of Washington project that the average daily Covid cases in the country will peak at 1.2 million by January 19, 2022. However, it is expected to fall sharply “simply because everybody who could be infected will be infected,” as per Mokdad.
He further said, “by the university’s complex calculations, the true number of new daily infections in the U.S. — an estimate that includes people who were never tested — has already peaked, hitting 6 million on Jan. 6”. Meanwhile, Britain reports a drop of 140,000 in the average daily Omicron cases, last week, following a skyrocketing surge of more than 200,000 daily cases earlier this month, the government data says.
