The rate of deaths from COVID-19 will drop sharply in the next four weeks, according to a new forecast that shows a brutal wave of declining cases and the United States is advancing with the distribution of vaccines.
The nation is expected to have about 12,666 dead the week ending March 13, according to the University of Massachusetts Reich Lab’s COVID-19 forecasting center, which released a four-week forecast on Tuesday. The prediction is based on independent models collected in collaboration with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The toll would be a 43% drop from the 22,062 deaths reported last week, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
Although cases have declined for a month, deaths (a lagging indicator) have not dropped much from record levels, according to data from Johns Hopkins. That should start to change this week and the numbers are likely to gradually improve over the four-week period. The pace would be the slowest since the period ending Nov. 28.
(Tabulation methods vary and the widely used COVID Monitoring Project count shows that deaths are already declining to a more significant degree.)
According to the Bloomberg Vaccine Tracker, the launch of vaccines is still in its early stages, with only 4.5% of Americans receiving the required doses. But Americans also wear masks at near-record levels and move less, according to survey and mobility data collected by the Institute of Health Metrics and Assessment.
In addition, the CDC estimates that some 83.1 million Americans may have already been infected, and many have acquired a measure of natural immunity that has been shown to last at least five months.
Still, there are many reasons to be alert. The United States is beginning to see new variants of the virus spread more easily and many residents have been forced to gather in homes and shelters to wait for a winter storm. In addition, Americans have tended to relax mitigation measures as soon as cases begin to dwindle in their communities.
The United States released 53,410 new cases on Monday, bringing the seven-day average to 86,002, the lowest since Nov. 3, according to Johns Hopkins. The data show that there have been about 487,000 deaths overall.
According to the data of the monitoring project:
- The number of people currently hospitalized with the virus has decreased from a week earlier in all but North Dakota and Wyoming.
- South Carolina recorded the most cases per capita last week.
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