PROVIDENCE, R.I. - In a Zoom webinar for Brown University, medical experts discussed the prevalence of new variants of the novel coronavirus and what it means for the world’s attempts to return to normalcy as COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations across the U.S.
surge while vaccination rates wane.Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, said by March 2021 he had a strong dose of optimism about the course of the global COVID-19 pandemic."If we were speaking in mid-June, things looked really good.
In fact, numbers were way down. Vaccinations were continuing to climb," Jha said. Jha said he can list two factors that have caused the trajectory of the pandemic to veer differently than he expected.