EDITORIAL: Will delta be the ‘last major wave’ of COVID?

The past 18 months have been an excruciating roller coaster of COVID peaks and valleys, but some public health observers believe the country may finally be near a post-pandemic state.

Credit vaccines and the waning delta variant for the hopefulness.

“Any of us who have been following this closely, given what happened with delta, are going to be really cautious about too much optimism,” Justin Lessler of the University of North Carolina told NPR. “But I do think that the trajectory is toward improvement for most of the country.”

Mr. Lessler is involved with the COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Hub, which combines data from nine different models to calculate projections about the disease’s course. While some models during the pandemic — particularly in the initial stages of 2020 — were woefully off base in their worst-case scenarios, modelers now have much more concrete data with which to work.

The latest analysis from the modeling hub predicts that “cases and deaths will likely decline steadily now through the spring without a significant winter surge,” NPR reported last week.

This dovetails with a report Monday by David Leonhardt of The New York Times that “COVID-19 is once again in retreat.” Mr. Leonhardt notes that confirmed cases in the United States have fallen 35 percent since Sept. 1, with hospitalizations dropping about 25 percent in the past five weeks and daily deaths falling 10 percent since Sept. 20.

Mr. Leonhardt reports that the respiratory ailment has followed a pattern of rising and peaking every two or three months regardless of whether government restrictions are in place, a cycle that remains a mystery to epidemiologists. “Many popular explanations,” he writes, “like seasonality or the ebbs and flows of social distancing, are clearly insufficient, if not wrong.”

Mr. Leonhardt points out that the delta surge is waning even though schools have reopened. He could also have added that cases are falling despite the fact that Americans have been packing football stadiums now for more than a month.

As vaccinations increase, the likelihood of another major wave engulfing the country declines. About 76 percent of Americans over the age of 12 have now received at least one COVID shot. Many of the inoculated also enjoy the double protection of natural immunity having recovered from the disease, making it increasingly more difficult for the virus to spread.

“Barring something unexpected,” Scott Gottlieb, a former FDA commissioner and the author of “Uncontrolled Spread,” a new book on COVID, told the Times, “I’m of the opinion that this is the last major wave of infection.”

We can certainly hope. And we can all help ensure that this deadly roller-coaster ride comes to an end sooner rather than later by getting vaccinated.