U.S. Coronavirus Cases Are Falling, but Variants Could Erase Progress - The New York Times

New daily cases are starting to slow in what some health experts see as a turning point.

CHICAGO — In recent days, coronavirus cases have been dropping steadily across the United States, with hospitalizations falling in concert.

But health officials are growing increasingly concerned that quickly circulating variants of the virus could cause new surges of cases faster than the country is managing to distribute Covid-19 vaccines.

Public health experts likened the situation to a race between vaccination and the virus’s new variants — and the winner will determine whether the United States is approaching a turning point in its battle against the coronavirus, now entering a second year.

Nationwide, new coronavirus cases have fallen 21 percent in the last two weeks, according to a New York Times database, and some experts have suggested this could mark the start of a shifting course after nearly four months of ever-worsening case totals.

This week, the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which puts out a predictive model that is widely used for planning, including by some government agencies, released a projection saying new cases in the United States would decline steadily from now on.

Some experts, looking abroad at how new viral variants sent cases surging in Britain, Ireland, South Africa and northern Brazil, said the United States could merely be in a lull before a new spike begins.

Chan School of Public Health and Yale University who run the Covidestim Project, which tracks levels of herd immunity, said he felt it was “more probable than not” that infections would climb again.

In places that have seen a slowing of new cases in recent days, local and state health officials were sharing positive — but tentative — news about the virus.

Allison Arwady, the commissioner of public health for Chicago, said at a news conference on Thursday, noting that because of encouraging metrics in the city, museums have reopened, gyms are allowing group classes and more restrictions could be loosened in the coming days.

Gretchen Musicant, the Minneapolis commissioner of health, said that officials in the state were “encouraged, but wary” of the situation, and that they continue to be watchful as Minnesota begins reopening certain sectors of the economy once again.

There was optimism among health experts that deaths from the virus, which in the United States have reached levels in January higher than at any other point in the pandemic, may soon slow some.

Public health experts had hoped that first vaccinating the groups at highest risk of death or most likely to be exposed to the virus would result in fewer deaths among those infected.

But if new virus variants lead to significantly more infections, “it’s going to result, eventually, in more deaths,” said Andrew Noymer, an associate professor of public health at the University of California, Irvine.

North Dakota, which once had the country’s worst rates of coronavirus infection, has seen its cases slow in recent weeks.