Infectious disease expert Michael Osterholm on Monday contradicted President Donald Trump’s fanciful claim that the U.S. will soon be in “very good shape” with the coronavirus pandemic, instead predicting “an explosion” in new cases starting next month.

Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, told CNN’s Don Lemon that the U.S. is “just really beginning to get to the really large part of the problem” with an average of 45,000 to 50,000 new confirmed cases of the virus per day.

“When school starts both at the high school level and in college and universities, we think we’re going to see an explosion of cases in September that will far surpass what we saw after Memorial Day,” Osterholm said. “And that this is just going to continue increasing, getting higher and higher, in terms of numbers.”

Osterholm elaborated in an op-ed he wrote with Neel Kashkari, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, that was published in The New York Times on Friday. The column argued the U.S. needs another lockdown to slow the spread of the virus. …

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• We’re Thinking Of Covid-19 The Wrong Way. It’s Not A Wave – It’s A Wildfire — We have no previous experience with a worldwide coronavirus pandemic, so when Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, began spreading, public health experts leaned on our experiences with influenza pandemics to inform their predictions. These pandemics are often described in terms of “waves” and “troughs”. We have now seen enough to replace the ocean analogy with a better one: wildfire. Like a wildfire, the virus relentlessly seeks out fuel (human hosts), devastating some areas while sparing others. It will continue spreading until we achieve sufficient herd immunity … Read The Rest

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Fauci Fact-Checks Trump’s Big Coronavirus Claim, Warns Of ‘Difficult Winter’

“The virus is telling us what it can and will do if we don’t confront it properly.”

By Ed mazza
HuffPost (8/11/20)