Cases, hospitalizations and deaths are lower than they’ve been in years. We asked experts how to think about personal risk — and what the future likely holds.
Deaths from Covid-19 in the United States are the lowest they’ve been since March 2020, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s data tracker. Case rates have similarly plummeted, though infections have become harder to track because of the widespread availability of at-home rapid tests; many of the monitoring systems that were set up at the beginning of the pandemic have also been wound down.
Is this finally the beginning of the end of the pandemic, or just another spring ebb before a new variant initiates a summer wave? (For the past two years, numbers have fallen between March and June, before rising in July.) The New York Times spoke with epidemiologists and infectious disease experts to gauge how they’re thinking about this particular juncture in the pandemic — what the risk is right now, what precautions they’re continuing to take, who is still getting severely ill and dying, and what the future may bring.
Spring reprieve
Experts agree that the risk from Covid-19 right now is low, and spring 2023 feels different from previous years.
“We’ve reached a stage of stability where people are making choices to return their lives to something closer to normal,” said Dr. Robert Wachter, the chair of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. “And I think that makes sense. Cases are relatively low; deaths are relatively low.”
The biggest reason for this improvement is that virtually everyone in the United States has some form of immunity now, whether from vaccines, a previous infection or both. Medications like Paxlovid have also significantly reduced the risk of serious illness.