A recent The Nature News Explainer headline reads Will there be a COVID winter wave? with a sub-heading “Emerging variants and waning immunity are likely to push infection rates higher in the Northern Hemisphere as influenza also makes a comeback“.

Quoting scientists the magazine writes “Evidence is building that the Northern Hemisphere is on course for a surge of COVID-19 cases this autumn and winter. New immune-evading strains of the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2, behaviour changes and waning immunity mean that many countries could soon see large numbers of COVID-19 infections — and potentially of hospitalizations”.

Referring to data from COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Hub, it reports that as long as people get their booster shots, the chances of arising more new variants in the US were low.

Some scientists like Tom Wenseleers, an evolutionary biologist at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, speculate that “The current rise in SARS-CoV-2 infections is probably largely because in most people, immunity generated by vaccines or previous infections is waning. People are also mixing more than they did earlier in the pandemic.”

Regarding the size of the anticipated winter Covid wave, Justin Lessler, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who leads the modelling effort, told “While a completely different game than it would have been in 2020 or 2021, a surge still would probably be associated with an increase in deaths and an increase in hospitalizations. In a bad flu year, hospital systems get pretty stressed.”