Short Wave - What's Next For The Pandemic? Will COVID-19 Become Endemic Soon?

Episode Date: January 25, 2022

Many experts warn there will be more infections on the downslope of the omicron surge, but the U.S. is on the path to the virus becoming endemic — and that should mean fewer interruptions to daily life. Take a listen to Rachel Martin chat with health correspondent Allison Aubrey about what's next in the pandemic on Morning Edition. You can email the show at [e-mail]. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, hey, shortwavers, Emily Kwong here. Okay, I have good news and I have bad news. The good news is that across the country, overall, we are seeing pandemic cases drop. Numbers are falling. The bad news, though, is that in places where cases remain steady, hospitals are scrambling to make room for new COVID patients. Alison Aubrey, who's been a lighthouse of pandemic coverage these last two years, spoke with Morning Edition's Rachel Martin about where we are and what the U.S. might see come springtime.

As has been the case at different points over the past two years, how you experience the pandemic depends on where you live. New cases of the coronavirus are declining sharply in parts of the Northeast and the Midwest, yet many places in the south and west continue to see record numbers of new infections. and more than 150,000 people are hospitalized nationwide. And P.R.'s Allison Aubrey is with us, as she is many Mondays. Hi, Allison. Good morning, Rachel. So there really are areas of the country that appear to be past the peak, right? Where exactly? That's right. I mean, looking at the map, the declines are most notable in places that were among the first to see a surge in Omicron cases.

Washington, D.C., New York have about half as many cases compared to their peaks. Cases are dropping in parts of the Midwest. including Ohio, Florida and Texas have started to see a decline in new infections, but a lot of areas are still in the thick of it, Rachel, Utah, Oregon, as well as Alabama and Tennessee. And what about the hospitalization rate? You know, nationwide, new hospital admissions are down slightly, about 3% over the last week. But remember, they've been at pandemic record highs. I spoke to emergency medicine doctor Jeff Pothoff at UW Health in Madison, Wisconsin, where they are at full capacity.

Right now, it's as bad as it's ever been. We're still seeing a ton of COVID patients. And we're still in the situation where every day we're postponing elective surgical cases. We're also postponing what we call tier three and tier four surgical cases, which are cases that, you know, you can postpone for a week or two, but not really much longer. We're doing all of that, and we still can't make everyone fit. He says smaller hospitals in the region, transfer patients into his hospital, but his hospital hasn't been able to take them all. Meanwhile, Alison, the latest CDC data has deaths rising.

Is that right? That's right. The U.S. is averaging just under 2,000 deaths a day. That's up from about 1,200 in early January. So it's an extraordinary loss of life. I mean, we keep hearing that OmerCon leads to milder illness. And while that's true overall, keep in mind there have been millions of infections amid this surge,

even if less than 1% of infected people end up in the hospital and some fraction of those patients die, the numbers just add up. But we do seem to be near a turning point. Some models suggest the worst is close to over, predicting deaths will begin to decline soon in the coming weeks, and the cases will continue to come down. Here's Ali Maqdad of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. What we are seeing right now in many states, it's coming down as fast as it went up. And come March, April, we should be in a very good position.

Our infections would be very low. I am willing to bet right now. I'm not into betting as a scientist, but spring breaks will happen. And we should feel for a while that we are in a very good position. So you can hear some optimism there, and I think a lot of us can imagine a nice spring getaway. I definitely could, though I'm struck by how he phrased the end of his comment there, right? He said we should feel we're in a good position for a while. I mean, is this just the nature of the beast that there are going to be moments when we feel good and secure, and then another variant's going to pop up? You know, because the coronavirus is thrown so many curveballs, none of the experts I've spoken to regularly during this pandemic is willing to say emphatically, you know, this is over or near over. Scientists know the virus will continue to mutate. But there is a consensus that given the extraordinarily high number of people being infected during this surge and the fact that so many of us have protection from the vaccines and boosters, we are in a much better situation. I talked to Michael Osterholm of the University of Minnesota.

He says we are likely headed into better days soon. For the everyday person, it is very hopeful that we can see that new normal where people can not feel a threat being in a everyday person. public place, but I worry that we could see another variant that could put us back into the same kind of position that we saw with Omicron. You know, the good news is vaccine makers continue to work on vaccines that could target variants or offer kind of broader protection. And there are a lot more therapies to treat COVID, including the new antiviral medications. Right. So then theoretically, any future waves of infection or surges are going to be hopefully more manageable? You know, that's the idea. And all the experts I talk to say,

key to managing future outbreaks is for the health care system and public health officials to kind of build on what they've learned over the last two years when it comes to testing, to surveillance, to genomic sequencing, to stay on top of which variants are out there. And Michael Oosterhombe says, if we plan for the possibility of future outbreaks, there could be systems in place to make sure that medicines, such as the new antiviral pills, which are in short supply now, would be readily available. We need people to be able to get tested quickly. And we need to be able to, to provide drugs to them quickly that could surely avert any kind of serious illness, hospitalizations, or deaths. So that work is going to have to go on. He says it may not be noticeable to most of us.

Our lives will hopefully return to something that resembles normal, but there should be planning, happening behind the scenes, because COVID is not going away. So, Allison, I do have to ask. You know, I have a friend. I talked to her the other day. She's got two little kids, both under the age of five. And she describes life as just freezing, right? It's like the beginning of the pandemic for her because her little ones can't get vaccines. And in conversations around this, we do sort of forget that there's this huge population of having these young kids who are still vulnerable. Any update on one that could change. Yeah, well, both Pfizer and Moderna have ongoing clinical trials for kids under five.

Moderna has said it will report data in children two to five years of age in March. Now, Pfizer announced a while back that had found kids two to five were not getting a strong enough immune response with two doses. in their clinical trial. So the plan now is to test a third dose. I spoke to pediatrician Yvonne Maldonado at Stanford. She is one of the investigators on the Pfizer study. We're hoping that in the next few weeks we can start to give that third dose to the children who were already enrolled in this study. And then what we could do is just measure the blood antibody levels in those kids some weeks after they get the dose and then see if that third dose then gives the children antibody titers their equivalent to the adult levels.

She says this third dose study could be finished within the next couple of months, and then, of course, it would be up to the FDA to evaluate this data. All right, NPR health correspondent Alison Aubrey. Allison, thank you, as always, for your reporting. We appreciate you. Thank you, Rachel.