Washington State new COVID case projections through Feb. 1st. (Images courtesy of UW’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation)
The latest COVID models indicate another winter surge is upon us, but it looks like it will be a lot more survivable.
The team at UW’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation is looking at a couple of areas, starting with the new XBB subvariant-related surge in hospitalizations in Singapore. “It’s a pretty rapid increase in hospitalizations over a short period of time, very nice analyses out of Singapore telling us that it’s more transmissible, but,” says IHME’s Doctor Christopher Murray, “the good news is those analyses suggest there’s no immune escape with BA.5.” Those observations find that people with BA.5 infections in the past few months had almost no cases of XBB. However, Murray says areas with low previous Omicron infection numbers, especially BA.5, could see a greater surge. Murray says like the rest of the Omicron family, the disease appears to be less severe.
They’re also watching what Murray calls higher rates of hospitalization in Germany than at any time in the pandemic. Murray says, “We should expect that to spread, probably due to BQ.1 or BQ.1.1, but it should spread to other parts of Europe.”
Murray says we’re seeing winter seasonality begin with slow increases in the Northeast US and we should expect big increases around the northern hemisphere but not a big increase in deaths from COVID.
You can see in the image above that Washington’s new COVID case numbers should peak January 19th and aren’t expected to increase as much as US cases (right).
China remains the big question with mixed messages about the future of its “Zero COVID” strategy, where whole regions are shut down when there’s an outbreak. Murray says President Xi Jinping has said publicly Zero COVID will continue. Murray says if Zero COVID remains, they don’t see a huge surge, but if that policy is scaled back at all, they do expect surges because there are so many people susceptible to COVID in China. The country also has a very low vaccination rate among the elderly, who are at greatest risk of COVID.
You can learn more details from Dr. Murray in the video below:
