The COVID-19 booster shot campaign is moving at a faster clip than the original vaccination push, according to a new U.S. study. That’s the good news. The bad news is the pace may not be quick enough to ward off an onslaught of omicron infections over the winter.
“We can’t get boosted fast enough,” says David Lazer, university distinguished professor of political science and computer sciences at Northeastern. He predicts more outbreaks such as the one that recently hit Cornell University as a flashing warning sign for the rest of the country. Cornell “went from 40 or 50 students being positive every day to several hundred students testing positive, and suddenly everything shut down,” Lazer says. “And that was literally overnight. We can anticipate that we will have an enormous peak of cases over the next two months.”
With the U.S. having recently crossed 800,000 COVID-19-related deaths, it is very likely that the one-million mark will be reached in the spring of 2022. “That would be my best guess,” says Lazer.
