Some US states appear to have turned a corner following early springtime COVID-19 surges

States with springtime Covid-19 surges appear to have turned a corner Average daily Covid-19 counts in Michigan, Massachusetts, and other states have started to fall, hinting at a relatively normal summer. Andrew Joseph STAT

Michigan and other states that experienced springtime Covid-19 surges or faced worrisome transmission trends appear to have turned a corner, with drops in new cases in recent days as vaccines reach more people.

After hovering at stubbornly high levels or increasing over the past two months, average daily cases in Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Illinois, and other states in the Midwest and Northeast have started to fall, providing a breath of relief that the communities are past their most recent peaks. Crucially, new infections in Michigan — which experienced the worst of the spring spikes, with some of its highest Covid-19 levels of the entire pandemic occurring in recent weeks — have started declining, with hospitalizations also starting to tick down.

Experts are cautious that the progress has just begun and needs to be sustained if the states want to actually achieve low levels of transmission. But they’re heartened that it appears vaccines are increasingly not just protecting individuals from Covid-19, but are starting to have broader benefits for communities.

“April’s been a bad month,” said Preeti Malani, an infectious disease physician at the University of Michigan. “There are hospitals across the state overwhelmed with patients. And because staff are sick, they’ve been having trouble with staffing their hospitals.” Different parts of the state remain under different levels of pressure, but now, with a big increase in vaccine availability in the past month, Malani said, “I’m optimistic about the direction we’re headed.”

At the national level, the country’s average daily infection count has also started to come down, from more than 70,000 in the middle of April to closer to 60,000 now. But summarizing the U.S. Covid-19 epidemic from that frame obscures how much variability there is. After experiencing a horrific surge over the winter, California now has one of the lowest rates of infections in the country, while cases in Puerto Rico have increased over the past month.

We remain in a complicated stage,” Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said at a briefing Monday. “On the one hand, more people in the United States are being vaccinated every single day at an accelerated pace. On the other hand, cases and hospitalizations are increasing in some areas of the country, and cases among young people who have not yet been vaccinated are also increasing.”  ...