The coronavirus might be mitigated by the summer in the U.S., but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is warning of a possible tidal wave rolling back in this fall.
The CDC projects, "most likely, for another wave that we would anticipate in the late fall, early winter where there will still be a substantial portion of Americans that are susceptible," director Dr. Robert Redfield said, according to Newsweek.
"Hopefully, we'll aggressively re-embrace some of the mitigation strategies that we have determined had impact, particularly social distancing."
The White House coronavirus task force is predicting a peak of confirmed cases and deaths in the coming weeks.
Most respiratory viruses are seasonal, but this coronavirus is more virulent than influenza and can be passed between humans showing no symptoms, according to the CDC director.
"This virus does have the ability to transmit far easier than flu," he said, per Newsweek. "It's probably now about three times as infectious as flu. One of the [pieces of] information that we have pretty much confirmed now is that a significant number of individuals that are infected actually remain asymptomatic. That may be as many as 25%.
"This helps explain how rapidly this virus continues to spread across the country, because we have asymptomatic transmitters and we have individuals who are transmitting 48 hours before they become symptomatic," he added.
The U.S., because of world-class testing, has almost double as many confirmed cases (207,535) as the next most-infected country, Italy (110,574), according to Worldometer, which culls data from Johns Hopkins University and recent media reports. At least 4,609 have died in the U.S., which is the third-most in the world behind Italy (13,155) and Spain (9,053).
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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