Hot-spot Midwestern states have reported modest declines in new daily COVID-19 cases over the past few days, but epidemiologists have warned against taking this as a sign that the surge is over.
“I think it is premature to feel that we turned the corner until we see at least a week or two to have sort of [a] decline,” said Dr. Oguzhan Alagoz, an expert in healthcare analytics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
New daily cases in most Midwestern states have declined in recent days, offering a glimmer of hope that the third surge of the pandemic pummeling that specific region is on its way out. Epidemiologists say that hope disguises the persistent surge across the region; a surge they expect will worsen as the weather gets colder and people spend more time indoors.
“This is why there’s going be relatively more opportunities for the virus to transmit,” Alagoz said. “Unfortunately, I don’t believe that we have turned the corner yet, maybe next week. Let’s have another conversation after we look at the data, but at this moment … I think we may see another increase.”
State-by-state virus tracking by the New York Times shows that cases in most Midwestern states have increased drastically in the past two weeks. The average rate of new daily cases in Ohio has increased roughly 68% since two weeks ago, while Indiana’s average case rate has risen 42% over that same period.
Several Midwestern states that have some of the highest test positivity rates since early October, such as Iowa and the Dakotas, have recorded declines in new daily cases. Iowa’s average rate of new cases, for instance, declined from 52% in the week ending Nov. 13 to 41.1% on Tuesday, still about double the rate reported this time last month.
“There have been some modest decreases, but those modest decreases are from very, very high initial starting places,” Dr. Amber D’Souza, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, told the Washington Examiner. “There are a few encouraging signs that some progress is being made, but we are definitely still in Code Red.”
The devastating increase in cases combined with holiday travel have raised the specter of an even more severe surge covering more territory across the country.
“We’re already at rates that are higher than most areas in the U.S. … And now, we have increased travel at a level that I don’t think we’ve seen during the pandemic,” D’Souza said. “That is a recipe for a really rough upcoming few weeks.”
Pleas from healthcare providers and the federal government to avoid travel appear to be falling on deaf ears. The Transportation Security Administration reported that last weekend was the busiest weekend for travel since mid-March, with more than 3 million total security check-ins from Friday through Sunday alone. As of Tuesday, more than 6 million people had traveled by plane over the past week. Still, this year’s holiday travel rates are just a fraction of what they were in 2019, with 15.8 million total travels over the same period last year.
Meanwhile, demand for travel by train has plummeted more sharply. Amtrak spokesman Jason Abrams told the New York Times that demand for train travel is only 20% of what it was in 2019. AAA projected two weeks ago that 50 million people in the United States will travel for the holiday, which is down 10% from 2019, making it the largest one-year decrease since the Great Recession in 2008.
