Infectious disease specialist warns of new COVID-19 waves infecting younger people

The infectious disease expert, Michael Osterholm, warned on Sunday about an upcoming ‘fourth wave’ of coronavirus infections in the US, partly due to a more contagious variant that spreads and affects younger people.

“I believe we are in a way almost in a new pandemic in a way,” Osterholm, director of the Center for Research in Infectious Diseases at the University of Minnesota, told Chris Wallace of Fox News Sunday. “The only good news is that the current vaccines are effective against this particular variant, B117.”

In addition to the fact that this variant is more contagious and deadly, Osterholm said it is more likely to affect children, an age group that has been largely affected by COVID-19 throughout the pandemic.

“Unlike previous strains of the virus, we did not see that children under the eighth grade regularly became infected, or that they were not frequently very ill,” he said in a separate interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press. “

“Children play a big role in transmitting this,” he told Wallace.

Osterholm said he was initially in favor of students returning to the classrooms physically, but because the virus is changing, he is also changing.

‘There is not a country in the world at the moment that has seen a huge increase in this B117 that has not been locked down. We are the exception. And so the conclusion of all these countries is that we could not control this virus until we did the exclusion, ‘he told Wallace. “We need to work better to help the public understand that this is a short term. All we are trying to do is get through this surge of cases that are going to take place over the next six to eight to ten weeks through this B117 variant. ”

Former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner, dr. Scott Gottlieb, on Sunday, also attributed new outbreaks in some states to an increase in infections among younger people, but said he did not think there would be a “true” fourth wave of cases, thanks to the increasing number of vaccinations.

“What we are seeing are bags of infection across the country, especially in younger people who have not yet been vaccinated, and also in children of school-going age,” he told CBS News ‘Face the Nation’.

Gottlieb said he believes the FDA may approve Pfizer’s emergency vaccination for children ages 12 to 15.

The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Rochelle Walensky, also warned last week about a sense of “impending doom” over the recent rise in the seven-day average of cases.

“If we see the increase in some cases, it’s true that things really tend to get bigger,” she said.

The country’s seven-day moving average has risen over the past few weeks, to 64,000 on Saturday. The last time it was this high was in early March, according to the CDC’s website.

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