Infectious disease experts are warning Americans to reconsider their priorities with winter approaching faster than people would think, bringing with it the possibility of an even worse crisis in coronavirus.
The problem is that many people do not take advantage of the summer that offers the breaths to limit the spread of the virus, instead choosing to go back to pre-pandemic routines, Stat News reports. “We just keep going at every opportunity we get with this epidemic to get it under control,” said epidemiologist Michael Mina, an assistant professor at Harvard’s TH Chan School of Public Health and associate medical director of clinical microbiology at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “The best time to squash a pandemic is when the environmental characteristics slow down the transmission. It’s your only chance during the year, really, to use this extra assistance and get transmission under control.”
There’s still time to do that, per Stat, but if Americans do not act fast, they can expect blacker than normal winter months. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, predicted that without stopping a new lockdown or an effective vaccine by the end of the year, winter will force people indoors and end the pandemic increase, which he said will see peaks “far away” that are more than those the U.S. has experienced in recent weeks. Read more at Stat News.
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