When New Hampshire started reporting more than 400 new cases of COVID-19 a day back in November, Gov. Chris Sununu announced a state-wide mask mandate, tightened travel restrictions, and asked Granite Staters to stay home.
Five months later, cases have once again passed the 400 mark, but things are different. Instead of announcing new restrictions, the state has relaxed several COVID safety measures. Though seemingly counterintuitive, the risk calculus is more complicated as more people sign up to receive vaccines.
On one hand, cases are rising alarmingly fast — in the last week, the number of new cases have increased by nearly 20%. Hospitalizations and deaths from the virus are no longer declining. On the other hand, the number of people with COVID-19 is dwarfed by the nearly 250,000 people who have been fully vaccinated in the state.
Michael Calderwood, an infectious disease expert and chief quality officer at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, said the state isn’t free from COVID concerns yet. If the rate of vaccinations and new infections continue as they have been, he said it seems likely the state is heading towards another surge.
This increasing infection rate is difficult to chalk up to holiday gatherings or a specific policy decision, but Calderwood said, generally, the reopening process is moving too fast.
“We can win this fight,” he said. “But we are not ready to say we have won today.”
In recent months, some of the most effective strategies to combat the spread of COVID-19, like mask wearing and social distancing, have become less common. Calderwood said the number of Americans who say they always wear a mask has slowly started to decline and according to cell phone GPS data, people are traveling even more than they did before the pandemic.
Calderwood said he thinks the excitement surrounding vaccines has caused people to let their guard down too soon. Public health experts are tasked with allowing more freedoms to an antsy public while simultaneously avoiding a surge.
“People are reaching a point where they want things to change,” he said. “We need to find a happy medium where we allow things to open where society can function, but we try to do it in the safest manner possible.”
New Hampshire’s rise in cases is not unique — most states in the northeast are seeing numbers start to creep up. But whether the increase in cases signal another wave of the virus is still out for up for debate. Anthony Fauci, the chief medical advisor for the Biden administration, said Friday that though the numbers are disturbing, he hopes the rate of vaccinations will outpace the spread of the virus.
The race between vaccines and the virus grows closer everyday as more contagious variants of COVID-19 proliferate across the country. One study published in Nature found that the B.1.1.7 variant, commonly known as the U.K variant, is between 43 to 90 times more transmissible than the older variants. Several studies have also documented that the U.K variant is far more deadly.
Of the 1,900 samples that have been sequenced in New Hampshire, only about 100 have been identified as the U.K variant, said Ben Chan, New Hampshire’s state epidemiologist. Still, public health experts expect it to become the most common version of the virus within weeks.
“Those will just continue to spread and be a problem for us unless we slow down until we get a sufficient number of people vaccinated,” Calderwood said.