{"id":2635882,"date":"2021-09-30T14:39:59","date_gmt":"2021-09-30T18:39:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.futurity.org\/?p=2635882"},"modified":"2021-09-30T14:40:26","modified_gmt":"2021-09-30T18:40:26","slug":"when-will-covid-19-pandemic-end-2635882","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.futurity.org\/when-will-covid-19-pandemic-end-2635882\/","title":{"rendered":"When will the COVID pandemic end?"},"content":{"rendered":"
The worst of the pandemic may finally be over, according to new modeling results from a consortium of researchers advising the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.<\/p>\n
The team’s COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Hub<\/a>, which is co-coordinated by researchers at Penn State, projects that COVID-19 cases will decrease across the United States, barring the emergence of any new variants or major changes in behavior.<\/p>\n “There’s a lot that could change…. The virus has surprised us again and again.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n “This projected decline in cases could be due to a number of factors, including the availability of vaccines to children ages 5 to 11, which may be available in the next few weeks, and the increasing number of people that are now immune due to either vaccination or natural exposure to the virus,” says Katriona Shea, professor of biology and alumni professor in the biological sciences at Penn State.<\/p>\n The researchers combined nine different mathematical models from different research groups to project the trajectory of the pandemic over the next six months.<\/p>\n “Synergizing results from multiple models has been shown to give much more reliable projections than any one model alone,” says Shea, who published a paper early in the pandemic demonstrating a technique for minimizing uncertainty by combining multiple models together to make projections.<\/p>\n The team specifically examined four potential scenarios, including whether childhood vaccine uptake will be high and whether a more infectious new variant<\/a> will emerge.<\/p>\n