(UW Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation daily new COVID case projections for Washington State)
The latest COVID projections show new case numbers will rise again in the fall, but while COVID deaths will also rise, it won’t be to levels we’ve seen in previous surges.
It wasn’t easy for the team at UW’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation to make the projections to January 1st because of unknowns, like how quickly immunity diminishes after vaccination or infection and the level of cross-variant immunity, but those projections show new COVID cases already rising a bit in Washington with the US to follow in a month.
IHME’s Doctor Christopher Murray says for the Northern Hemisphere outside China, they expect to see case numbers dropping for now, “and then start to go back up in October through the end of the year,” Murray says, “and the increase in infections, and this is in the absence of any new variant, so this is really just BA.5, the increase in infections could be quite large in the winter.”
Murray says they don’t expect deaths to rise nearly as much thanks to vaccines and anti-viral drugs, but he says if there’s a new variant that makes us sicker and evades immunity, that will change the picture.
He says governments should look at which mandates worked and keep those ready just in case, so that we can be protected from a more dangerous COVID variant while minimizing disruptions to education and the economy.
