Texas infectious disease experts warns declining COVID-19 cases 'calm before the storm'

Austin-Travis County is showing improvements in the fight against COVID-19 as daily cases and hospitalization continue to decline.

“What we are seeing is that folks are changing behavior. Folks are wearing masks, folks are staying home, and that is resulting in these decreasing cases,” said Austin-Travis County Interim Health Authority Dr. Mark Escott.

The recent decline in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations in the city and county mirrors a similar trend being felt across the country.

“For the United States, cases have peaked, and mortality, we expect that it will peak on the first day of next month and slowly it will come down,” said Ali Mokdad. “For Texas, mortality is leveling right now all the way through February 7th, and it will start coming down.”

Mokdad is a Professor of Health Metrics Sciences at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) and Chief Strategy Officer for Population Health at the University of Washington. Mokdad predicts this modest decline could be because the country is heading into warmer months and fewer people gathered over the holidays than anticipated.

“We were so concerned with the surge pre holidays that Americans, due to travel, will see a surge on top of the surge. We didn’t see it. Especially around thanksgiving and Christmas, it was very clear for all of us that Americans did what it takes in order to contain the virus and not pass it to their loved ones at the dinner table,” said Mokdad.

However, Mokdad says now is especially not the time to loosen the reigns on social distancing and wearing face coverings.

Dr. Peter Hotez, Dean for the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, also warns this could be the calm before the storm.

“Yes, we are seeing a decline in transmission, in the United States and Texas as a whole, but there’s something lurking that we have to worry about, and this is of course the emergence of the new virus variants,” said Dr. Hotez. “We’re starting to see an uptick in those [variants] from the UK, from South Africa, from Brazil, and we know they can be very aggressive. Aggressive means that those virus lineages can quickly out-compete the others and ramp up transmission.”

It is unclear how or when these new COVID-19 variants could impact case numbers here in the U.S., but Dr. Hotez worries it could all happen quickly. His message is that now is the time to ramp up COVID-19 distribution.

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“I’ve been making this plea that this is the time now when we have to vaccinate the American people. We have to do it as quickly as we can. We can’t make plans to be vaccinated now by the end of the year, or by the fall. We have to now use the next few weeks to vaccinate as many people as possible and that’s a message that’s been kind of tough to get through,” he said.

“We have to remain vigilant until we reach herd immunity,” said Mokdad. “Otherwise it will be exactly what we have seen last summer, [case] going down in May, then we went up over the summer because we celebrated prematurely, and we let down our guard.”