Will the US face another bad COVID winter? Cases are falling, but the virus isn't done with us, experts say

Behavior has a major impact on what happens with the virus, and if people stop taking precautions, start gathering in large numbers and not getting vaccines or boosters, another wave could strike this winter.

The virus that causes COVID-19 thrives in cool, dry air. And when people gather indoors, especially unmasked, they are more likely to transmit it.

For many people, vaccinated or infected months ago, protection against the virus that causes COVID-19 may be waning. .

COVID-19 infection rates fell about 12% last week compared with the week before, and hospitalizations dropped 14%, Walensky said in a news conference. .

In some areas, vaccination rates are so high that, combined with natural infections, it could be hard for the virus to gain a foothold among the relatively few people left unprotected.

The virus has spread so far and so fast, it doesn't seem possible anymore to eradicate it, experts say.

Getting more people vaccinated will help us reach that milestone, said Warner Greene, a virus expert at Gladstone Institute in San Francisco. .

"This virus will continue to circle back and prey upon us until we can get much higher vaccination rates," he said.

Unfortunately, as with the cold and flu, it seems this virus can be caught over and over again, as natural infection and protection from shots fade over time. .

The virus isn't done with us, said Jeffrey Shaman, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health.

It could be because the virus changes as it passes from person to person, or variants could breed in immunocompromised people whose immune systems can't quite tamp down the virus.

Even in the last flu pandemic, the H1N1 pandemic of 2009-2010, about 76 out of every million people who caught it died.

With COVID, he said, 3,000 out of every million people infected will die. .

Bibbins-Domingo said people like her are often portrayed as as "doomsayers," but she thinks it's within the public's power to prevent another wave of infections and deaths.

The future also depends on whether the virus, which as Shaman said, has been "squirrelly" so far, manages to throw another curveball

In Vermont, where vaccination rates are high but not many people have caught the virus, a variant that escapes the vaccine but not natural infection might chart a different path than in places like Arizona and Florida, where vaccination rates are lower but a much higher percentage of residents have been infected, he said