Yale Epidemiologist Urges Caution in Forecasting COVID-19’s Future
If there's anything learned from 18 months of COVID-19, “it’s really humility” about forecasting the pandemic's course for the rest of 2021 and into 2022, Albert Ko, epidemiology professor at the Yale School of Public Health, told a Conference Board…
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webinar Friday. “There are very few of us, including myself, who would have predicted that we would be confronted with a pathogen that would double its transmissibility in a period of one year,” said Ko. “So we really need to be cautious” in predicting the future of COVID-19, “given the uncertainties on many different fronts,” he said. Ko’s “personal read” is that the U.S. will be “coming down off the curve” of the delta variant in Q4, “for reasons we don’t entirely understand,” he said. “The question is, how fast are we going to come down off that curve and whether we’re going to prevent a resurgence.” Fending off a new spike in cases during the “cold winter months,” as happened in early 2021, “is certainly going to be a challenge,” he said. With 80 million “eligible” Americans still unvaccinated, “my own personal opinion is that we’re primed for hard mandates” on vaccines in the U.S., as President Joe Biden announced Thursday, he said.