Experts Weigh In On What High COVID Numbers Mean For Fall

It feels impossible to go somewhere right now and not hear people coughing, sneezing and sniffling ― and that’s because COVID-19 is everywhere. If you haven’t been recently infected, you probably know someone who has.

According to wastewater data from the Centers for Disease Control, dozens and dozens of states have “very high” or “high” levels of the virus at the moment, which begs the question: What does this mean for the upcoming respiratory virus season when illnesses like COVID usually spike?

We asked experts what they think this summer COVID surge means for the next few months. All three experts said they’ve been surprised by surges and lulls time and time again, making it impossible to definitively say what will happen in the next few months ― but here are their best predictions:

Dr. Scott Roberts, a Yale Medicine infectious diseases specialist and the associate medical director in infection prevention at Yale New Haven Health in Connecticut said he expects COVID cases to decrease in the early fall for a period of time.

“With this atypical July through August surge, I would predict that we would undergo this pattern of falling cases that would extend through at least the next few months,” he said. “So, I would probably predict we’d have a relatively decent end of September, October period, just based on the natural pattern we’ve seen with these waves.”

“There’s still a ton of COVID going around right now. In some places, it might be just starting to kind of slow down, possibly maybe enter a period of decline, but really, there’s a lot of COVID happening right now,” said Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo, a professor of epidemiology and the director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health in Rhode Island.

According to the CDC, test positivity rate is slightly down from the end of August. Roberts does not expect these predicted lower case numbers to stick around long-term, though.

“I anticipate that we will see higher numbers of COVID beginning with the fall and winter months,” said Dr. Matthew Binnicker, the director of clinical virology at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

“The fall and winter months typically see a higher rate of respiratory viruses like [COVID-19] and influenza, as people are indoors and respiratory viruses like [COVID-19] seem to be able to survive or persist in the cooler temperatures, lower rates of humidity allow for the virus to be spread further,” he added.

Binnicker expects the rates to be even higher than what we saw during the summer surge, particularly during November, December and January.

Roberts said he also expects to see a winter wave, but thinks it’ll be lower than previous winters.

“Everybody who’s being infected right now, I think the odds of them getting infected over the winter are much less because they’re having an immunity boost to the current circulating variants,” Roberts said. “So unless there’s some sort of variant from left field that we’re not expecting, I would predict that this winter wave in December, January, February would be lower than that of the past few winters. But I still do expect an uptick.”

As mentioned above, COVID-19 is unpredictable — we know this from the last four-plus years of the virus. While it’s helpful to anticipate what COVID-19 may do in the coming months, no one really knows.

“I could imagine a scenario in which we have a little bit less COVID this fall and winter, because so many people got sick over the summer. But I also don’t know what’s going to happen with how the virus mutates and if a new variant or a subvariant emerges that could change things,” Nuzzo said.

The unpredictability of COVID means it’s best to do what you can to not get sick or lessen the illness if you do end up infected.

“The best step is to get the updated COVID vaccine … it’s been designed to elicit immune response against one of the more recent SARS-CoV-2 variants,” Binnicker said.

You can get the new shot now as long as it’s been two months since your last COVID-19 vaccine. The CDC also states if you recently had COVID, you can wait three months to get the jab — but you don’t have to. If you don’t know when to get the new shot, talk to your doctor who can help you make the best choice for you.

Additionally, if you have any signs of COVID-19, stay home, Binnicker said. This will help keep other folks from getting sick. If you do have to go out, wear a mask, he noted.

COVID-19 is a hard thing to predict, it doesn’t fit the regular respiratory virus pattern, which is a rise and peak during the fall and winter.

“I’ve been wrong in my [COVID-19] predictions before … but I can tell you with almost absolute certainty, we’re going to see RSV and flu go up since those have been pretty nonexistent since last winter,” Roberts said. “Flu and RSV … are much more tried and true with the patterns of a seasonal winter spike.”

To protect yourself from the flu, get your flu shot, which Roberts recommends getting in October. There’s also a RSV vaccine for older people and high-risk folks.

With coughing, sneezing, fever, body aches and headache being overlapping symptoms for these respiratory viruses, it’s important to take a COVID test, Binnicker said. If your test comes back negative, call your doctor who can test you for flu and RSV. This way, you can get the necessary medical treatment to get better and keep those around you well, too.