How we react to the curve could also stretch it out, and that’s the biggest wild card of all. When people hear that we’ve skittered past the top of a peak, “psychologically, they loosen up,” UNC’s Lessler told me. (This is something that many epidemic models don’t account for.) Masks come off. Schools, workplaces, and leisure venues reopen. People rejoin social circles, or kick-start new ones. Smaller shifts such as these, multiplied by millions, can turn a waterfall decline into molasses. “So much of susceptibility is tied up in behavior,” Majumder said. And as people get further out from their most recent vaccination or infection, their risk of catching the virus goes back up.
A lethargic decline is a costly one. Already, health-care systems around the country are being pummeled by record-breaking cases. In many states, hospitals are hitting capacity; people are struggling to access care for all sorts of sicknesses. Hospitalization and death waves are smaller in magnitude than infection waves, and lag behind them, but they’re “much more protracted,” UT’s Meyers said. The sheer height of our infection peak is already poised to haunt us. There have been so many infections that cases, hospitalizations, and deaths won’t return to November’s pre-Omicron levels—let alone the numbers of last year’s early-summer lull—for a long time. “It’s going to get much worse before it gets better,” Meyers said. Even if the United States’ curve turns out to be symmetrical, half of this wave’s infections, and more than half of its hospitalizations and deaths, are still ahead, past the peak of cases. Adding any more weight to the curve’s far side just makes that picture uglier.
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