NEW YORK (NewsNation Now) — Are we seeing the light at the end of the COVID-19 tunnel?

Some of the latest numbers show coronavirus cases are on the way down in the U.S., with models predicting that they’ll keep dropping, even through the winter.

New daily U.S. cases are down 12% since Sept. 10, according to the New York Times Covid Tracker, but is the worst of the pandemic behind us?

Leading epidemiologists at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York say yes, cases are going down, and indications are they’re going to keep going down, even though the colder months.

The reason scientists say new daily COVID-19 cases are down is two-fold:

• We’ve had a lot more people vaccinated since delta became the dominant variant, about another 38 million.
• We’ve also had about 9 million new cases.

Putting those numbers together means the virus has a lot fewer people to infect.

Scientists also say that delta, while being a highly transmissible variant, leaves a lot of immunity behind.

Even in parts of the country with lower vaccination rates — like the South and the Southeast — scientists are seeing an increase in natural immunity.

The models show scientists a downward trend in cases following the pattern of immunity, either through vaccination or from the virus itself.

Are we out of the woods? Not at all.

This doesn’t mean we get to let our guard down. The indicators right now are encouraging, and they get more encouraging, medical experts say, the more Americans get vaccinated.