One of the interesting ramifications of the COVID-19 pandemic is that most Americans became very interested in statistics and epidemiology over the last eighteen months. It seems that every politician and news program put a multitude of graphs on the screen to help people understand what exactly was going on with the Coronavirus. Almost always, those graphs showed new cases reported to the CDC. Which, for many, is the key metric when it comes to understanding the pandemic.
But, as a ministry leader, you can take that data and go one step deeper to really understand the trends—and the impacts on your people—related to COVID-19.
Let’s start by taking a look at the current COVID data. Nationally, cases have leveled off in the United States, and in many states they are experiencing a significant decline after going through another outbreak due to the delta variant. While there’s no singular cause for this reduction in new cases, it’s likely attributable to both the rising numbers of vaccinated Americans and the reality that many others have achieved protection against the virus by having been previously infected by an earlier variant.
As a ministry leader, you may feel a sense of relief when seeing those case counts head in a downward direction. But there’s an important pattern to be aware of when considering what the next several weeks have in store for your congregation surrounding community. There’s ample evidence from the prior waves that these spikes happen in this predictable pattern:
First, COVID case counts hit a peak, level off, and then slowly decline over time. But as those case counts decline, hospitalizations still continue to rise for several weeks as many of those infected with the coronavirus will take several days, if not weeks, to develop severe symptoms and need to be admitted to the hospital. Deaths, then, are a lagging indicator of a rise in COVID-19 cases. They will not begin to drop for another four to six weeks after case counts start a downward trend.
What that means from a ministry perspective is this: the impacts of this latest decline of the pandemic are not over yet. There’s good reason to be hopeful, but be aware that people in your church and local community could still be facing the reality of hospitalization or death from the virus. While it’s important to help people maintain optimism as they hear about declines in reported cases, your ministry team can be intentional about how to care for your people amidst the long-tail impacts in the weeks that follow.
Take heart, the good news is that there are better days ahead and there’s good reason for hope. While it’s impossible to know with certainty, the preponderance of evidence indicates that every successive wave of this pandemic will be less severe than the prior one.
