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A homeless man is seen walking along a nearly empty London street April 17, 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic. (CNS photo/Toby Melville, Reuters)
April 19, 2020
Catholic San Francisco
On-and-off periods of social distancing will likely be needed into 2022 to ensure that hospitals have enough capacity for future COVID-19 patients in need of critical care, a new Harvard University study says.
Harvard reported the details in the following press release.
The modeling study from researchers at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health., published April 14, 2020, in the journal Science, predicted several scenarios for how the coronavirus might spread over the next five years, taking into account factors such as whether or not the virus will exhibit seasonality, whether people who are infected go on to develop short-term or long-term immunity, and whether people would get any cross-protective immunity from having been infected with other types of coronaviruses that cause common colds.
Even if one 8- to 12-week period of social distancing is successful in “flattening the curve” -- keeping the infection rate low enough so that hospitals aren’t overwhelmed -- many people will remain susceptible to COVID-19, said Yonatan Grad, assistant professor of immunology and co-senior author of the study, in an April 15, 2020, WBUR interview.
In the absence of other interventions, there could be a resurgence of COVID-19 among this susceptible group, which would require further intermittent periods of social distancing until enough of the population develops immunity, either through becoming infected or through a vaccine.
Social distancing restrictions could be eased under various scenarios, according to the authors -- if COVID-19 treatments become available, if hospitals can increase their intensive care bed capacity, if there’s aggressive contact tracing and quarantine, or if a vaccine is developed.
“I think social distancing interventions of some sort are going to have to continue, hopefully lightened and in conjunction with other interventions,” said Marc Lipsitch, professor of epidemiology and director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics and co-senior author of the study, in an April 14 article in STAT.
The authors wrote that they’re aware of the severe economic, social, and educational consequences of social distancing. They said their goal is not to advocate a particular policy but to note “the potentially catastrophic burden on the healthcare system that is predicted if distancing is poorly effective and/or not sustained for long enough.”
Read the study: Projecting the transmission dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 throug the postpandemic period.
New COVID-19 state-by-state U.S. analyses from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington find that as early as May 4, some states may be able to relax some aspects of social distancing measures so long as “robust containment strategies” are implemented to prevent a second wave of infections.
Those states include Vermont, West Virginia, Montana, and Hawaii. However, other states, including Iowa, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Utah, Arkansas and Oklahoma, may need to wait until late June or early July.
Strategies for safely relaxing some social distancing include widely implemented testing, contact tracing and isolation of confirmed cases, and restricting large gatherings. Actual decisions by states to relax social distancing should be informed by meeting critical metrics closer to these dates, including a very low number of estimated infections in the community – less than 1 estimated infection per 1 million people.
IHME also announced that the number of daily COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. may have peaked April 15, with 2,481 deaths. The Institute now is estimating 60,308 (estimated range of 34,063 to 140,381) deaths across the U.S. by Aug. 4, down from 68,841 as predicted on April 13.
A competing model, by the University of Texas, said deaths have likely yet to peak and are not likely to peak in many states until after May 1.