A downtick in COVID-19 cases is raising hopes that the omicron wave has peaked in the United States.

To be sure, new case numbers remain high and hospitals are still overwhelmed in many areas. But, especially in the earliest hard-hit states like New York and Massachusetts, cases are clearly declining, and experts say cases appear to have peaked on a national basis as well.

The U.S. seven-day average of new cases fell from about 798,000 on Jan. 15 to about 744,000 on Jan. 19, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data, the first downturn since mid-December, when the highly transmissible omicron variant took hold and cases began a rapid spike.

“I think we’ve turned the corner,” said Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease expert at the University of California-San Francisco.

While cases may be falling nationally and in early hit states, experts caution that the U.S. is a large country and some areas, such as Western states like Montana and Wyoming, may take longer to peak.

They also caution that hospitalizations and deaths are lagging indicators — meaning they could continue to rise for a few weeks after cases begin to fall. There are a record 160,000 people hospitalized with the virus, according to a New York Times tracker, and about 2,000 people dying every day from it.

“It’s wall-to-wall stretchers; we have no capacity left at the hospital,” Robert Jansen, the chief medical officer at Grady Hospital in Atlanta, said at a media briefing this week.

In a few weeks, once hospitalizations have time to fall as well, the U.S. could be in a much better place.

“By mid-February, there are going to be many areas that honestly seem strangely normal,” said David Rubin, director of the PolicyLab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

CDC Director Rochelle Walensky noted during a press briefing Friday that “overall nationally the case numbers are coming down, which I consider an optimistic trend.”

The possible national peak in omicron cases comes as the Biden administration has begun rolling out additional measures that experts have been pushing for months, like free N95 masks and a website to order free rapid tests.

Those tools could finally become more widespread after the worst of the omicron wave has already passed.

“There’s a metaphor here which involves horses and stable doors,” said William Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “It should have been done way in the past.”

Gandhi said once the omicron wave passes, the country could enter a more “endemic” phase of the virus, in which it continues to exist but no longer poses a crisis affecting every day life, and widespread masking and testing among the general public are no longer needed.

Because so many people will have been infected with omicron, on top of the immunity provided by vaccines and boosters, the population will have far greater immunity coming out of this wave. Experts still stress that it is far better to never be infected at all, and get immunity through vaccines and boosters, rather than getting sick.

Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, said that whether there is another major spike from a new variant in the future will depend on to what extent the next variant can evade the immunity many Americans have built up.

He said the worst-case scenario is “a variant that’s so different that it eludes the accumulation of the immune protection that we’ve gotten from vaccinations and from prior infections.”

“I hope that doesn’t happen; I can’t give you a statistic of what the chance of that happening [is], but we have to be prepared for it,” he added. “So we hope for the best and prepare for the worst.”

Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, wrote in The Lancet this week that more than 50 percent of the world could be infected with the omicron variant by the end of March.

The combination of this immunity, plus vaccines that can be adapted to new variants and new antiviral treatments, will lead to a new phase of the virus, he writes.

“The era of extraordinary measures by government and societies to control SARS-CoV-2 transmission will be over,” he writes. “After the omicron wave, COVID-19 will return but the pandemic will not.”

Experts have been calling for months, though, for greater efforts to vaccinate the world, as the best way to ensure that a new dangerous variant that can elude immunity does not emerge.

More than 80 Democratic lawmakers last month called for $17 billion for global vaccinations and other efforts to fight the virus around the world in a coming government funding package.

The fact that the omicron variant tends to cause less severe disease on average also helped avoid an even greater crisis that would have occurred if it was as severe as the delta variant.

“Had Omicron been Delta and had we had fewer vaccinations we’d be seeing 8,000 deaths/day, may be more,” tweeted Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, who noted cases nationally have now “likely peaked.”

“As [the] Omicron surge ebbs and life returns back to more of a normal let’s use that time to prepare to more effectively manage future variants and surges,” he added.

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An omicron-driven surge of COVID-19 is hindering the economic recovery from the pandemic.

The swift, record-shattering spike in coronavirus cases has dampened consumer activity, spurred layoffs, and forced millions of Americans out of work to take care of themselves or a sick family member. Private sector data on dining and travel, rising weekly jobless claims, widespread staffing issues, and school closures is pointing to dismal January job gains and slower first-quarter growth.

While economists say the omicron variant will not derail the economy as a whole, millions of front-line workers, working parents and service sector businesses are staring down another brutal pandemic winter.

“It’s pretty clearly doing things that are bad to the economy,” said Claudia Sahm, macroeconomic research director at the nonprofit Jain Family Institute.

“The underlying pace of the recovery is in a place where it can weather the storm. But there are clearly some workers and some families and some small businesses that are not going to weather the storm,” she added.

A slowing recovery driven by rising COVID-19 cases is a major challenge for President Biden, who ran for the White House on a pledge to end the pandemic and rebuild the economy. The president’s approval ratings on his handling of COVID-19 and the economy have fallen steadily as both virus cases and consumer prices have spiked.

Biden’s sweeping social services and climate plan — a pillar of his economic agenda — is on ice after Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) torpedoed the package in December and insisted Thursday negotiations must start “from scratch.” The Supreme Court also struck down Biden’s private sector vaccine mandate last week, disarming the president’s most aggressive attempt to curb the pandemic.

While the White House is scrambling to send out millions of rapid tests and masks, omicron has already taken a toll on consumer sentiment and economic activity.

Fifty-nine percent of adults believe normal activities pose “moderate” or “large” health risks, according to a poll from Ipsos and Goldman Sachs Investment Research, the highest total since March 2021. Those fears are likely behind a sharp drop in Transportation Security Administration airport throughput and OpenTable’s dining tracker.

“Employers with public-facing workers, like schools and emergency service providers, appear to have had particularly large shares of their labor force isolate due to the virus,” wrote economists at Goldman Sachs in a Thursday research note.

Roughly 12 million Americans missed work in the first 10 days of January either to care for a loved one with COVID-19 or to avoid contracting it, according to a Moody’s Analytics analysis of Census Bureau data released Wednesday, twice the total during the same period in December.

Weekly jobless claims also rose by 55,000 to a seasonally adjusted total of 286,000 last week, according to the Labor Department, reaching the highest level since October.

Both the claims data and the Census Bureau survey cover the period when the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) calculates the federal monthly jobs report — a foreboding sign for January employment growth.

“With so many workers out, odds are high that the BLS will report employment declined in January,” tweeted Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics.

“The worker shortages will likely also give wages and inflation another temporary boost,” he added.

Higher pressure on wages could be cold comfort for low-earning workers struggling with both the toll of front-line jobs during the pandemic and the strain of higher prices. While omicron’s relatively tamer symptoms may limit its overall impact, infection could still mean severe consequences for low-wage and front-line workers.

“There’s a lot of focus on the fact that omicron often leads to mild symptoms. But for a worker, especially a parent, the implications are still extremely disruptive,” said Molly Kinder, a fellow at Brookings Institution who studies the impact of COVID-19 on low-wage workers.

Workers without paid sick leave or the ability to work from home could lose significant income even from a mild case of COVID-19, Kinder said, without the safety net of federal protections or unemployment benefits that lapsed last year.

“A lot of front-line workers just simply don’t have a cushion to draw on to be able to compensate for that,” she continued “And if you’re a parent, what you worry about then is your child can get it or could be forced to quarantine as well and not go to school or not go to day care.”

Omicron could also delay the return to the labor force for millions of workers who’ve remained on the sidelines because of health concerns or child care responsibilities.

Despite the intense pressure facing some households and businesses, Congress is unlikely to send another major relief package to Biden’s desk. While lawmakers are discussing additional spending for public health measures such as mask and test distribution, the relative strength of the economy and high inflation makes more fiscal relief a non-starter.

“I do not think that we need any additional COVID spending. We’ve had too much government spending, and the problems of inflation and stagnant labor force supply that we’re seeing are, in part, really driven by excessive amounts of fiscal support,” argued Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank.

While Sahm said the Biden administration and Congress should have never allowed pandemic unemployment aid to lapse, she acknowledged the limits of broader fiscal aid in curbing the blow of omicron.

Even so, she and Kinder both warned against attempting to push through pandemic by forcing potentially infectious workers to come back.

“It’s a very shortsighted policy to not give workers enough leave to stay home until they’re healthy, because all that’s going to do is encourage workers to come back to work while they’re still contagious,” Kinder said.

“Shortchanging that because you’re worried about not enough workers could shoot yourself in the foot,” Kinder added.