COVID-19: The Ever-Evolving Coronavirus Impacts

Today, Europe is trying to claw itself out of its last lockdown. Then there is India:

India’s outbreak (NY Times)

“India has become the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, reporting a record of 131,968 new cases in the last 24 hours as the virus spins out of control. Deaths are rising, hospitals are quickly filling up and the country’s vaccination campaign is perilously behind schedule.
The surge in cases is a sharp U-turn for the country, which initially enacted one of the world’s strictest lockdowns when the virus arrived last year and had managed to keep per capita cases relatively low. Public health experts even wondered whether India might have some innate resistance to the virus, perhaps related to its warmer climate or younger population.”

The problem is that the virus has had an ebb and flow nature to it. Here in the United States, infections are ramping up, especially in Michigan. Please, don’t think that Michigan will be the only state to have an increase in infections. 

With numbers trending down in general, there is more “opening up” than there is “closing down” these days. Even in Michigan, the governor has been reluctant to talk about locking things down again. California is about to open up sporting events, albeit with reduced attendance and social distancing. 

I’m still projecting more troubles ahead for our immediate future. The fourth wave of the virus may not hit everywhere at once, but the more contagious version of the virus is now dominant here in the U.S. I see it as more of a “rolling” of peaks and valleys of infections coursing through the world and our nation. The next several weeks will be telling. We’ll see if spring break and all the associated travel has its way with us. A fourth wave is coming — what is unknown is how serious it will be in its impact. Twenty percent of adults in the U.S. are vaccinated, which will help. However, the people being hospitalized now are younger. 

Then, there will be more variants in our future. With places like Brazil and India completely out of control, it provides fertile ground for more variants to develop. The longer we see the uneven international approach to containing the virus, the less I see a short-term solution to our current situation. Easily, we will be dealing with COVID-19 all the way through 2021 and likely beyond.