Will COVID really just vanish by April?
Is there more HOPE in this commentary than fact?
In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal on Friday, Dr. Marty Makary — a surgeon and a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Bloomberg School of Public Health — said that there are actually many more than the 28 million confirmed cases of the coronavirus in the U.S., possibly as much as 6.5 times more than that number.
Between that group, and the roughly 15 percent of the country which has already received one dose of the vaccine, Makary argues that much of the nation is already protected from the virus.
“There is reason to think the country is racing toward an extremely low level of infection,” Makary wrote. “As more people have been infected, most of whom have mild or no symptoms, there are fewer Americans left to be infected. At the current trajectory, I expect Covid will be mostly gone by April, allowing Americans to resume normal life.”
x x x
pidemiologist Michael Osterholm issued dire warnings about the potential spread of the new, more contagious Covid-19 variants, saying that they could produce a surge of cases in the United States to levels “we have not seen yet in this country.”
Dr. Osterholm, who is director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota and a member of President Biden’s transition team advising on coronavirus, told Meet the Press host Chuck Todd that he expects to see cases of the new Covid-19 variants to surge “in the next six to 14 weeks.” As a result, he said the US may need to execute a major shift its vaccine strategy, focusing on administering the first dose of the vaccine to as many people as possible instead of trying to get people their second doses.
“We still want to get two doses in everyone, but I think right now, in advance of this surge, we need to get as many one-doses in as many people over 65 as we possibly can, to reduce serious illness and deaths that are going to occur over the weeks ahead,” Osterholm said.