COVID

‘One wave after another’: Brigham and Women’s doctor predicts the foreseeable future for COVID

"But the meaning of those waves has changed, and this is why I want to make sure that people don’t get discouraged."

By Madeleine Aitken

July 20, 2022

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The BA.5 variant has increased COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths, but Dr. Jeremy Faust says we’re not back to square one: “It’s not good, but we’re not that bad.” 

Faust, an emergency medicine physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an instructor at Harvard Medical School, said in an interview with Black Iowa News that there will be “surges of new variants for the foreseeable future.”

“But the meaning of those waves has changed, and this is why I want to make sure that people don’t get discouraged,” Faust said. “It’s bad that BA.5 is here and is causing cases and hospitalizations. But it’s not like 2020, where every single patient that I treat has terrible pneumonia and is starving for oxygen and is going to be on a ventilator.” 

Faust, who also writes “Inside Medicine” on Bulletin and is the editor in chief of MedPage Today, advised that people continue to mask in crowded areas and be outdoors as much as possible, and to vaccinate children before school starts up again in the fall.

He said finding and consuming reliable data on COVID-19 is important because things change so quickly — he suggested the CDC, state and local departments of health, and reputable blogs and social media accounts. 

Looking to the future, Faust noted that there will soon be better vaccines and therapeutics to treat COVID-19, and that keeps him hopeful. 

“We’re going to have vaccines this fall that are targeted at Omicron and that’s a good thing,” he told the publication. “And I think that vaccines like nasal vaccines called mucosal vaccines might be like the sort of key to this all — in terms of making it so we can really stop the virus from being around us all the time.

“We’ve made so much progress,” Faust said.

Read the full interview here.