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

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

“I believe in some ways 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’s Chris Wallace. “The only good news is that current vaccines are effective against this particular variant, B117.”

In addition to being known to be more contagious and deadly, Osterholm said it is more likely to affect children, an age group largely unaffected by COVID-19 during the pandemic.

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

“Children play a huge role in the transmission of this,” he told Wallace.

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

“There is currently no country in the world that has seen a large increase in this B117 that does not lock. We are the exception. And so the main message from all these countries is that we couldn’t get this virus under control until we shut it down, ”he told Wallace. “We need to make the public better understand that this is short-lived. All we’re trying to do is weather 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 also attributed new outbreaks in some states on Sunday to an increase in infections among younger people, but said he doesn’t think there will be a ‘true’ fourth wave of cases thanks to the rising number of vaccinations.

“What we’re seeing are outbreaks across the country, especially in younger people who haven’t been vaccinated and also in school-aged children,” he said on CBS News “Face the Nation.”

Gottlieb said he thinks the FDA could approve the Pfizer emergency vaccine for children ages 12 to 15. However, he does not expect it to be available to children younger than those for the start of the fall school semester.

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

“When we see that rise in the number of cases, we’ve seen before that things really tend to shock and get big,” she said.

The nation’s seven-day moving average of the number of cases has risen in recent weeks, up from 64,000 on Saturday. The last time it was that high was in early March, according to the CDC’s website.