Infectious disease expert warns of new wave of COVID-19 that infects younger people

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

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

In addition to this variant being known to be more contagious and deadly, Osterholm said it is more likely to affect children, an age group that throughout the pandemic has not been affected by COVID-19.

“Unlike previous strains of the virus, we did not see children below the eighth grade being infected frequently, or they were not often very sick,” he said in a separate interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” program.

“Children are playing an important role in transmitting this,” he told Wallace.

Osterholm said he was initially in favor of students’ physical return to classrooms, but as the virus is changing, it is also changing.

“There is no country in the world now that has seen a huge increase in this B117 that is not closing. We are the exception. And so, the final message from all of these countries is, we couldn’t control this virus until we blocked it, ”he told Wallace. “We have to do a better job to help the public understand that this is a short term. All we are trying to do is to overcome this wave of cases that will occur 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 an increase in infections among young people, but said he does not believe there will be a “real” fourth wave of cases, thanks the growing number of vaccinations.

“What we are seeing are pockets of infection across the country, especially in younger people who have not been vaccinated and also in school children,” he said on CBS News’s “Face the Nation” program.

Gottlieb said he thinks the FDA could authorize the Pfizer vaccine for emergency use in children 12 to 15 years old. He doesn’t expect it to be available to children younger than that before the fall term begins.

The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Rochelle Walensky, also warned last week of a feeling of “impending doom” about the recent increase in the average number of cases over seven days.

“When we see this increase in cases, what we have seen before is that things really tend to increase and increase a lot,” she said.

The country’s seven-day moving average of cases has increased in recent weeks, reaching 64,000 on Saturday. The last time it was so high was in early March, according to the CDC website.