Infectious Disease Expert Warns New COVID-19 Wave Infects Younger People

Infectious disease expert Michael Osterholm warned on Sunday that a “fourth wave” of coronavirus infections is coming in the US, due in part to a more contagious variant that is spreading and affecting younger people.

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

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

“Unlike previous strains of the virus, we haven’t seen 8th graders often become infected or often very ill,” he said in a separate interview with NBC’s Meet the Press.

“Children play a huge role in conveying this,” he told Wallace.

Osterholm said he was initially in favor of the physical return of students to classrooms, but because the virus is changing, so is he.

“There is no country in the world right now that has seen a big increase in this B117 that is not stalled. We are the exception. Thus, the message from all these countries is that we could not control this virus until we blocked it “, he told Wallace. “We need to do a better job of helping the public understand that it is short-term. All we are trying to do is go through this increase in cases that will appear in the next six to eight to 10 weeks because of this B117 variant ”.

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

“What we see are pockets of infections across the country, especially in younger people who haven’t been vaccinated and in school-age children,” he told Face the Nation on CBS News.

Gottlieb said he believes the FDA could authorize the Pfizer vaccine for emergency use for children between the ages of 12 and 15. He is not expected to be available to children younger than him before the start of the autumn school semester.

Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, also warned last week of feelings of “imminent condemnation” of the recent seven-day average increase in cases.

“When we see this increase in cases, what we’ve seen before is that things really tend to grow and grow,” she said.

The nation’s seven-day moving average has risen in recent weeks to more than 64,000 on Saturday. The last time it was so big was in early March, according to the CDC website.