According to data from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, there will possibly be a surge of COVID-19 at the beginning of December.
“That means that they are expecting a hundred million new cases to come up around that time frame, which is almost one-third of the nation's population," said Dr. Rutul Dalal, the medical director of Infectious Diseases at UPMC in North Central Pa.
The reason?
“First of all, people’s mindset, they think the pandemic is over. The masking enforcement is going down, booster vaccination fatigue is high on the list," said Dr. Dalal.
Experts say that initially there was interest in the latest booster, but add that a lot of people are tired of the never-ending shots.
“They’re saying, 'we keep poking ourselves with these shots and when is this going to end?'" said Dr. Dalal.
However, doctors say the latest booster protects against the latest variant.
“It also contains BA.4 and BA.5 of the subvariant of the omicron strain in it, and 80% of the infections right now across the country are being caused by [the] BA.5 variant," said Dr. Dalal.
He recommends people get the latest booster shot by Halloween since it usually takes up to four weeks after the vaccine for immunity to completely build up.
“If we can prevent even two hundred deaths a day less than what the expectations are, you’ll be still saving around 100,000 people’s lives," said Dr. Dalal.