The 2021 winter wave will be the largest Covid wave so far

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It looks like the 2021 Covid global winter wave will be a much larger repeat of the 2020 winter wave, with Europe and North America being the biggest contributors of new Covid cases again.

The growth in the current North American wave is about to overtake the declining Asian wave, to contribute, as it did last year, perhaps half of all winter cases.

Shown below is the 2020 winter wave. It was largely comprised of cases from North America and Europe. Note the crossover between the North American and Asian waves on 29th October 2020, which happened at about 90,000 daily cases.

 

Shown below is the 2021 winter wave so far. Note the imminent crossover between the America and Asia waves on the far right of the chart, on or about 14th November 2021, also at about 90,000 daily cases, just over two weeks later than last year.

 

And below is the view of all global waves so far.

Note that the current European wave is about to exceed it’s previous 2020 highs within days. In 2020 the peak in European cases was on November 8th, just as the various national lockdowns and other mitigations began to kick in.

 

Below is our estimation of the size of the first global winter wave in 2020/2021. National lockdowns and other mitigations broke the wave in half, and without them it would have been by far the largest wave so far:

 

We have already predicted that this coming winter wave will be the largest wave so far due to the lack of mitigations in place. In 2021, lockdowns have been largely ruled out, schools are open, facemasks have been abandoned in many areas, and social distancing is no longer even discussed. 

Without urgent mitigations, it’s going to be a very harsh winter indeed.

 

 

 

More in our Decoding Sars-Cov-2 series:

 

 

 

Image by Cristian Vazquez from Pixabay

** This post was originally published on November 14, 2021 **