The image is ubiquitous on social media: a line graph with a sharp, high peak on the left and a broad, much lower peak on the right, accompanied by admonitions to 鈥渇latten the curve鈥 for novel coronavirus infections.
What will the peak look like for COVID-19 in the U.S.? And when will it occur?
鈥淭hose are hard questions to answer,鈥 says , a senior associate in the and an assistant professor in at the Bloomberg School. 鈥淲e usually don鈥檛 know that we鈥檝e reached the peak until we鈥檙e past it. And at this point, we don鈥檛 know what the next day will bring,鈥 she says.
Rivers points out that measures meant to stem transmission in the U.S., such as school closures and recommendations for social distancing, were only relatively recently put into place. If those interventions do what they鈥檙e supposed to, then the number of new cases should gradually slow and then stop as they have in other hard-hit locations. For example, in Hubei, China鈥攖he province where the disease was first identified and spread like wildfire before the government instituted a strict lockdown鈥攏ew cases have slowed to a trickle in the past week.
But it may be much harder to impose that kind of lockdown across the U.S., where personal freedom is part of the culture, says , an assistant scientist in International Health. Spotty implementation of largely unenforceable interventions across different states make predicting when the peak will occur more difficult; so does the paucity of data available on the actual rate of newly diagnosed cases due to limited testing. 鈥淲e are probably only catching a small fraction of those who are sick, making it a challenge to predict what will happen next,鈥 he says.
With such sparse data, statistical models used to forecast the path of other infectious diseases is only partly useful here, explains Thomas McAndrew, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. That鈥檚 why he and his mentor, associate professor of Biostatistics Nicholas Reich, PhD, recently started sending out weekly forecasting surveys to a variety of COVID-19 experts with different backgrounds: infectious disease modelers, physicians in the field, epidemiologists, and others.
Right now, he says, these experts are predicting a peak in the number of hospitalizations in May, with a strong possibility of a second peak sometime this fall.
, associate professor in Epidemiology at the Bloomberg School, says that whenever the peak actually occurs, we鈥檙e likely to see increasingly more of what鈥檚 already occurring: overstressed health care systems short of beds and personal protective equipment that put all patients鈥攏ot just those infected with the virus鈥攁t risk.
鈥淩ight now, we鈥檙e aiming for a completely different scenario than the two peaks presented in that social media graph,鈥 he says. 鈥淲e鈥檙e aiming to knock it down altogether.鈥
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