University of Virginia issued the following announcement on Jan. 19
Dr. William Petri has maintained his morning routine of running with friends, followed by an outdoor gathering with sips of coffee and casual conversation.
Yes, even in frigid temperatures.
“We have blankets,” Petri said.
Petri, the vice chair for research in the University of Virginia’s Department of Medicine, has developed his own “new normal” of life amid the coronavirus pandemic and the recent surge in cases caused by the omicron variant.
Meeting outside, masking indoors and doing work virtually have been a few of the strategies employed by Americans since March 2020 and the dawn of COVID-19.
So, when’s it all going to end? Petri, recently named a Maxwell Finland Award winner for scientific achievement by the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, said he, naturally, gets that question all the time.
And while that’s seemingly impossible to answer, Petri offered some points of optimism during a recent interview with UVA Today.
Q. According to a recent report by The Wall Street Journal, omicron cases have reportedly peaked in South Africa and the United Kingdom. What can that mean for the U.S.?
A. I think it’s hopeful that we’ll see something similar here. Peaking in the U.K. is good because the U.K. is much more like the U.S. than South Africa. South Africa, the population is much younger on average, and fewer people are vaccinated. So South Africa could have been a unique case.
The U.K.’s population is more similar to the U.S., and the reach of vaccination is comparable and maybe even better in the U.K. So that does bode well for us.
Q. In 2021, COVID cases seemed to peak in the winter and then decline in the spring and early summer. Do you see that pattern repeating itself for 2022 and the foreseeable future?
A. I do. There are many things changing all at the same time. In 2021, we saw the advent of vaccination, which changed things. We went to the emergence of the alpha variant early in 2021 and then that was replaced by at the beginning of the summer by the delta variant, which peaked in September and then declined. And then of course came omicron.
So there are a lot of things changing – the degree of the population that is vaccinated, if there’ll be a new variant that is even more effective at evading the vaccine or more effective at transmission than omicron – but, in general, I think we’ll end up with (COVID) as a wintertime epidemic and not a pandemic.
With more than 700,000 people officially getting infected every day (now), we’re going to run out of uninfected people in the U.S. It’s going to change things, where it’ll be more like influenza, where everybody has some degree of pre-existing immunity. We’re going to be in a much better place a couple months from now as we get out of winter and into spring, where there’s much less indoor transmission.
Original source can be found here.
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