As the COVID-19 pandemic creeps toward its third anniversary, the infenctious disease caused by a virus remains a fixture of everyday life yet is expected to trail off sometime in the New Year.
Thousands of infections and hundreds of deaths are still reported daily nationwide. Though numbers are lower than they were at the height of the outbreak, they remain high enough to cause concern.
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Although this winter could prove challenging for the pandemic, doctors told The Dispatch they’re hopeful it won’t be as severe as the past few. In 2023, COVID likely will cement itself as a seasonal virus — one that circulates in the fall and winter like influenza and the common cold.
Here’s what three Columbus doctors said about where they think COVID is heading this winter and next year.
Will there be a winter spike?
COVID infections already are rising, and doctors expect the increase to continue now that winter has officially arrived Dec. 21.
The holidays likely will fuel the spread of the virus, said Dr. Mark Herbert, an infectious disease specialist at Mount Carmel Health System. With COVID restrictions long gone and fewer people regularly taking precautions, such as masking and testing, holiday gatherings will be the perfect environment for the virus to spread, he said.
In fact, Herbert is worried a rise in COVID cases this winter could rival previous years, when infections overloaded the hospital system.
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“I’m quite fearful of that,” Herbert said. “It’s good to bring that up because it seems like it was a long, long time ago. But it actually wasn’t, … and it was literally all hands on deck.”
Although some level of a winter spike in COVID is inevitable, not everyone thinks it will be as bad as in previous years.
Dr. Joe Gastaldo, medical director of infectious diseases at OhioHealth, said he expects a surge in cases to strain hospitals through the rest of 2022 and into early 2023. But with the help of vaccines and antiviral medications for COVID, Gastaldo said, the health care system should be able to avoid being overrun again in the New Year.
“Barring some sort of very virulent variant, I don’t see us getting back to the point where we were last January,” Gastaldo said. “I just don’t see that happening.”
Is COVID endemic yet?
What’s become clear about COVID is that it might never stop spreading.
Doctors for years have been saying the virus likely is to become endemic, meaning there is a constant amount of that specific disease present in a geographic location, such as in a state or country as a whole, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Examples of endemic diseases include the chickenpox, influenza and common cold viruses.
“I think 2023 is really going to be the point where we know the virus isn’t going to go anywhere,” Gastaldo said.
It’s simply “too early to tell” exactly what endemic COVID might look like and precisely when it will enter that phase, said Columbus Public Health Commissioner Dr. Mysheika Roberts.
There’s a good chance the virus will mimic the flu and other repsiratory diseases and crop up every fall and winter, she said. That means people likely will need to get COVID shots for years to come.
“Like the flu shot, I anticipate COVID boosters will be something we need annually,” Roberts said.
How will the pandemic end?
Doctors all hesitated to say the pandemic was over, but the three told The Dispatch that the end likely was near.
For COVID, the next several months will be telling, Roberts said.
“It will likely be the spring before we can say that it is over,” Roberts said. “Even though restrictions have been lifted and it feels like we’re in a much different place, there is still a worldwide pandemic. We need more people in our community to get the booster.”
Gastaldo agreed and said staying up to date on COVID vaccinations and testing for the virus would remain crucial going forward.
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But Gastaldo said COVID is no longer “as disruptive as it has been over the last two years,” and that shows as life has nearly returned to normal.
There is no specific metric officials use to declare that a pandemic has begun or ended.
The World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic in March 2020 after the virus spread throughout several countries around the world. When it comes to the pandemic “the end is in sight,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a press conference in September.
The federal emergency declared for COVID in the United States, which most recently was continued in October, likely will come to an end in 2023, Gastaldo said. Although that might be just one more measuring stick as to whether the pandemic is still going on, Gastaldo said that in some ways it actually ended a while ago.
“I don’t want to minimize long COVID, daily deaths or the immunocompromised,” Gastaldo said. “But from my experience, most of the pain and suffering from the pandemic is over. It’s a label we’ve placed on (COVID) at this point. With the way we’re acting and living, it’s already over.”
mfilby@dispatch.com
@MaxFilby
