In just one day, the president is elected Joe Biden will be at the helm of affairs with a new government as the US continues to fight the COVID pandemic. Just before he officially took up his role as COVID adviser to the White House, Michael Osterholm, PhD, MPH, director of the Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, gave a cruel prediction about what lies ahead with respect to the spread of the virus. The Biden-appointed official warned that the new strains of COVID would turn the pandemic into something “different from what we’ve seen before.” For more information on his prediction, read on and for another recent warning from a new official, check out The New CDC Director Just Issued This Very Dark COVID Warning.
Currently, the British strain, which is said to be 50 percent more transmissible than the current dominant strain of coronavirus in the US, has been identified in 20 states, reports the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC). However, two other highly contagious strains – one from South Africa and one from Brazil – raise additional concerns, as they have mutated the virus more dramatically and may make our current treatments and vaccines less effective, a theory expert is currently investigating. Although these two strains have not yet been identified in the US, Anthony Fauci, Managing Director, recently told Newsweek the new variant would be discovered “sooner or later.”
But one thing is for sure: these new tribes are likely to cause cases to climb. During an interview on CNN New day On January 19, Osterholm warned: “We are suddenly going to see these variants come to play,” he said. “Based on the experience we have seen in Europe, especially South Africa, these variants can significantly increase the number of cases.”
Osterholm is concerned that the following is unknown in the pandemic. On January 14, he told the Minneapolis local branch of CBS News, WCCO, that these strains are a serious curveball. “The challenges are big, simple,” he said. “If you think we’ve had a problem with this virus so far, if these variants spread here and cause the problems [England and Ireland], God help us. ‘And sign up for our daily newsletter for more up-to-date COVID news sent directly to your inbox.
Osterholm predicts that a narrow shift in the pandemic is fast approaching. “I’m worried about the next six to twelve weeks. We’re going to see a situation with this pandemic, different from what we’ve seen before,” Osterholm told CNN. “And it really is a challenge that most people, in my opinion, do not yet realize.”
On January 15, the CDC issued a warning that the British variant could become the dominant tribe in the US by March, and experts such as Scott Gottlieb, MD, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, also shared a similar warning. During an appearance on CBS News Face the Nation On January 17, he said: “Right now, this new variant is about 0.5 percent of all infections at the national level. There are hotspots in Southern California and Florida that could be closer to 1 percent, but it’s going to double every week. So it’s going to double over every week. This is the experience from other countries and this is the experience we’ve seen so far in the United States. So it’s now 1 percent. It’s going to be 2 percent, then 4 percent, then 8 percent, then 16 percent, then 32 percent, so it will start taking over in five weeks. “According to Gottlieb’s forecast, this would put us in mid-February.
“What we are looking at is a relentless strike of this virus in the spring, while infections would really start to decline in the spring,” he pointed out. “We would have had a quiet spring. We could have persistently high infection levels in the spring until we finally vaccinated enough people.” Read The CDC warns against using these 6 face masks for some helpful tips to keep you safe.
Osterholm said vaccines are also an important component in reducing the impact of the pandemic and the new strains. However, he said: “we can not make the vaccine work much faster than it currently does.”
During a January 17 interview with NBCs Meet the press, Fauci also said that the vaccine is the way to avoid more significant spread of COVID, even if the new variant creates more infection. “The easiest way to evade this negative effect of these new isolates is to … only when the vaccine is available, people should be vaccinated,” he said. “If we can … get the vast majority of the population vaccinated, we’ll be in a very good condition and even beat the mutant.” And for more information on where the British tension has been so far, check out The New COVID Strain Is Now in These States.
About how bad the next phase of the pandemic will be, Osterholm said, it’s all about how quickly we take action. “The difference is going to be, we are going to react now or later,” he explained. According to Osterholm, the Biden government will take ‘dramatic steps’ to mitigate the spread of the new variant. However, he added that “the question is how soon will we do it? Do we apply our brakes after the cars have turned around the tree, or do we try to apply our brakes before leaving the intersection?” To see what precautions we can afford to abandon, you may not need these two COVID precautions. It finds new study.
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