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According to Chhatwal, this combination of lower vaccination and relaxed attitudes created ideal conditions for the Delta variant to spread in communities. "To get out of the wave sooner—or reduce the impact of the wave—we need higher vaccination rates and more social distancing, including indoor mask mandates in almost all states," he said.

“Look at Google Analytics, the prediction models, and waste water all pointing to the same trends,” Chhatwal said. “That tells us something about what’s happening in the state, which is trends should be going downwards from this point onwards.”

Dr. Jagpreet Chhatwal, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and the associate director of Massachusetts General Hospital’s Institute for Technology Assessment, which also projects COVID-19 metrics, cautioned that trying to predict what may happen with the virus in the weeks ahead is “highly uncertain.”

Jagpreet Chhatwal, a lead investigator of the COVID-19 simulator, which models the potential future of coronavirus infection and death based on behavior changes

Jag Chhatwal, Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School, joined KUSI to discuss the new study’s findings.

"We were surprised because before conducting the study I would think that mass gatherings in large stadiums would have contributed significantly to increase in daily number of cases. But our findings show that this indeed was not the case." said Turgay Ayer from Georgia Institute of Technology.

Jagpreet Chhatwal, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, helped design a tool to detect COVID-19 outbreaks in counties that hosted professional football games. "We can essentially break a transmission chain — and prevent a super spreader event — by adhering to masking and 6-feet social distancing at Raymond James Stadium," he said.

Jagpreet Chhatwal, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School who works on The COVID-19 Simulator forecasting project used for the CDC ensemble, sees a similar path. He told Newsweek: "Unfortunately, we can very likely hit 3,000 deaths per day by the end of the year if we continue at the current trajectory... it's just a matter of weeks that deaths per day will cross the previous peak seen in April."

Using our Covid-19 Simulator, we estimated that a lockdown of four to six weeks could substantially decrease Covid-19 in most states. Following such an intense period of sacrifice, it would be possible to reopen colleges and universities, and likely other schools and businesses, with firm masking and distancing policies to contain transmission.