At this very moment, the United States, as a whole, remains in its legit pandemic lull. Coronavirus case counts and hospitalizations are lower than they’ve been since last summer. There’s now a nice, chonky gap between us and January’s Omicron peak.
And yet. Outbreaks have erupted across Asia. Massive swaths of Europe, including the United Kingdom—America’s best pandemic bellwether for much of 2021—are firmly in the grip of a more transmissible Omicron subvariant called BA.2 that’s been simmering stateside for months.
The other COVID shoe seems poised to drop in the U.S. at some point, perhaps quite soon. When it does, it won’t be pretty.
“With policies, with supply, with vaccination rates, we are not prepared,” says Julia Raifman, a COVID-policy expert at Boston University.
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As it stands, “the CDC policy is to not take action to reduce spread until there is a high level of death,” Raifman told me. And that’s to say nothing about the long-COVID cases and other serious impacts that would follow as well.
The agency’s plan is simply too slow and too reactive, antithetical to how public health operates best—when it leans on proactive measures meant to prevent an undesirable future, says Maia Majumder, a computational epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School.
