Doctors Predict What COVID Cases Will Be Like This Fall And Winter

It feels impossible to go somewhere right now and not hear people coughing, sneezing and sniffling ― and that’s because COVID-19 is everywhere. If you haven’t been recently infected, you probably know someone who has.

According to wastewater data from the Centers for Disease Control, dozens and dozens of states have “very high” or “high” levels of the virus at the moment, which begs the question: What does this mean for the upcoming respiratory virus season when illnesses like COVID usually spike?

We asked experts what they think this summer COVID surge means for the next few months. All three experts said they’ve been surprised by surges and lulls time and time again, making it impossible to definitively say what will happen in the next few months ― but here are their best predictions:

Infections may start to slow down during the early fall.

Dr. Scott Roberts, a Yale Medicine infectious diseases specialist and the associate medical director in infection prevention at Yale New Haven Health in Connecticut said he expects COVID cases to decrease in the early fall for a period of time.

“With this atypical July through August surge, I would predict that we would undergo this pattern of falling cases that would extend through at least the next few months,” he said. “So, I would probably predict we’d have a relatively decent end of September, October period, just based on the natural pattern we’ve seen with these waves.”

“There’s still a ton of COVID going around right now. In some places, it might be just starting to kind of slow down, possibly maybe enter a period of decline, but really, there’s a lot of COVID happening right now,” said Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo, a professor of epidemiology and the director of the Pandemic Center