RELATED: Fully Vaccinated People Account for 1 in 4 COVID Cases Here, New CDC Report Says. While some experts predict that cases from the recent surge will peak sometime in October, the highly contagious nature of the Delta variant likely means we won’t see the pandemic really winding down this year. “I don’t think we’re really going to turn the corner until next spring,” Celine Gounder, MD, an epidemiologist and infectious disease specialist at Bellevue Hospital Center in New York City, told The New York Times. Gounder added that while they won’t be as severe as the ones experienced last year, we’ll most likely see another set of surges over major holidays such as Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s as people congregate indoors. She also points out that the return of students to the classroom provides a new way of spreading the virus that wasn’t seen during earlier phases of the pandemic. “A lot of schools across the country are just not taking this very seriously this year,” Gounder told The Times. “So you will see transmission from schools back into the community.” RELATED: Moderna Says These 3 Things Will Cause More Vaccinated People to Get COVID. Other experts echoed the prediction that certain areas might see different waves of infection than others depending on vaccine rollout. “The nature of Delta transmission means that the cases are going to go up in a lot of places at around the same time, but the consequences will be much, much worse in terms of absolute numbers in places with less vaccination,” Bill Hanage, MD, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told The Times.ae0fcc31ae342fd3a1346ebb1f342fcb Other top health officials have recently predicted that it may take months for the pandemic to change its trajectory. During an Aug. 23 interview with CNN anchor Anderson Cooper, White House COVID adviser Anthony Fauci, MD, took an opportunity to correct a previous statement he had made during an NPR interview, clarifying that “I hope we could start to get some good control in the spring of 2022.” RELATED: For more up-to-date information, sign up for our daily newsletter. When Cooper pressed Fauci about what having “control” of COVID really means, he said having “a degree of overall blanket protection of the community.” He added, “If we can get through this winter and get, really, the majority—overwhelming majority—of the 90 million people who have not been vaccinated, vaccinated, I hope we can start to get some good control in the spring of 2022.” Fauci said that achieving such goals could finally mean a return to life as we knew it before the pandemic. “As we get into the spring, we could start getting back to a degree of normality, namely reassuming the things that we were hoping we could do—restaurants, theaters, that kind of thing,” he predicted. RELATED: This Is When the Delta Surge Will Be Worst in Your Area, Virus Expert Warns.
