While US president elect Joe
Biden is still two months away from taking the reigns, the number of COVID-19 cases in America
is likely to increase to 20 million by the end of January, nearly doubling the
current level if Americans continue at the current level of social distancing,
revealed a study.

The study was published in the journal ‘Scientific reports’ and it claims
to have used the same mathematical model, which had accurately forecasted the
rate of coronavirus growth over the summer of 2020.

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“One of the
key reasons for the increased accuracy of this model over other COVID-19
forecasts is that this model accounts for the fact that people live in
interconnected social networks rather than interacting mostly with random
groups of strangers,” PTI quoted study co-author Raphael Thomadsen from
the Washington University in St. Louis in the US as saying.

“This allows
the model to forecast that growth will not continue at exponential rates for
long periods of time, as classic COVID-19 forecasts predict,” Thomadsen
added.

The study also
sheds light on the impact of ongoing social distancing scenario and suggests
that the current social distancing trends indicate an approximate 60% return to
normalcy.

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The researchers suggests
that it would take a few weeks for the US effectively grapple with the COVID-19
growth if the country goes back to the levels of social distancing it experienced
in April.

“Even small
increases in social distancing can have a large effect on the number of cases
we observe in the next two and a half months,” Thomadsen said.

However, the
observers also brought this to attention that this is likely a conservative
estimate due to increased testing and the upcoming holidays.

“In our
model, we assume that only 10% of cases are ever diagnosed, meaning that we
will start to hit saturation,” said Song Yao, another co-author of the
study.

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“However,
more recently, testing has increased, and probably more like 25% of
cases are diagnosed. In that case, total COVID cases would increase beyond 20
million in the next few months unless we, as a society, engage in more social
distancing,” Yao said.

Meanwhile, the
scientists opine that the holiday season with Thanksgiving and Christmas approaching
will expose people more to the virus transmission as travelling trends will
augment.