There's hope for the U.S. when it comes to the coronavirus pandemic, with the number of new COVID-19 cases cases and hospitalizations recently plummeting. But the crisis is far from over.

“We’re really in the eye of the hurricane right now,” Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, told Yahoo Finance Live. “We’ve been through the front wall. The past year has been dramatic and traumatic.”

The U.S. has seen more than 29 million cases of COVID-19 so far, with over 525,000 deaths. However, the 7-day moving average has been steadily declining as more Americans get vaccinated. That average was 57,400 as of Wednesday, a 16% drop from two weeks prior, according to New York Times data.

And as of Tuesday, 43,000 people in the U.S. were hospitalized with coronavirus, in stark contrast to a peak of 141,000 at the beginning of the year, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data analyzed by the Washington Post. But those numbers could creep back up, Osterholm pointed out.

“While we’re feeling this good feeling right now, which we should, in the sense that the case numbers have dropped precipitously, hospitalizations have dropped,” Osterholm said, “we’ve seen this play before where cases have gone up very high and then come back down, then gone back up again.”

The British variant

Three different COVID-19 vaccines are available to the public, and the U.S. has vaccinated 19.3% of the population with at least one dose of a vaccine. Still, two of those vaccines require a second dose, and only 10.2% of the country remains fully vaccinated, according to CDC data updated on Thursday.

The rollout may not be able to outrun the pace of a mutant strain of the virus, the British variant known as B117. It’s expected to become the most dominant strain over the next few months.

“The B117 variant in and of itself, which first started spreading in Europe, is showing its head now here,” Osterholm said. “We’re very concerned that it could cause a surge in cases over the course of the next six to 12 weeks. Vaccines are coming, but there won’t be enough here in the next six to 12 weeks to really blunt that B117 surge.”

At the beginning of the year, 1% to 2% of cases in the U.S. were attributed to the British variant. That number has since shot up to 20% in some parts of the country, according to data from Helix, a lab testing company, cited by The New York Times.

“While we can’t say for certain what it’s going to do in terms of just how many cases, it’s going to cause substantial transmission issues,” Osterholm said.