Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security, told MSNBC on Friday that any rise in winter cases will likely be “more decoupled from hospitalizations and deaths” due to the increased immunity due to vaccines and infections.

“Many more people have been vaccinated, so many more people have natural immunity from this big delta wave and unfortunately so many people have died that we probably won’t see peaks that are anything like we saw in the past, especially when it comes to what matters which is hospitalization, serious disease and death,” he said.

“I think delta was hopefully the worst that this virus can throw at us,” he added.

David Dowdy, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said he thinks it’s “unlikely” that the U.S. will endure another COVID-19 wave “to the level” of the summer delta and previous winter surges.