each community will experience its own, unique Omicron spike
......... How we react to the curve could also stretch it out, and that’s the biggest wild card of all. When people hear that we’ve skittered past the top of a peak, “psychologically, they loosen up,” UNC’s Lessler told me. (This is something that many epidemic models don’t account for.) Masks come off. Schools, workplaces, and leisure venues reopen. People rejoin social circles, or kick-start new ones. Smaller shifts such as these, multiplied by millions, can turn a waterfall decline into molasses. “So much of susceptibility is tied up in behavior,” Majumder said. And as people get further out from their most recent vaccination or infection, their risk of catching the virus goes back up. .......... Even if the United States’ curve turns out to be symmetrical, half of this wave’s infections, and more than half of its hospitalizations and deaths, are still ahead, past the peak of cases. ....... We heard this lesson early on in the pandemic, when cases were first rising at alarming rates: mask up, hunker down, flatten the curve. It’s still true now. The hope is that the lower the peak, the fewer unnecessary infections can occur after it ......... The key here, then, is to avoid seeing “past the peak” as a cue to relapse into riskier behavior. “The start of a decline is not sufficient to think we’re out of the woods”
