Some experts diagree on whether we are entering a ‘fourth wave’ of the pandemic?

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Mon, 2021-04-05 11:39 — mike kraft

Are we entering a ‘fourth wave’ of the pandemic? Experts disagree. Is this the beginning of yet another surge? Or is it only “pockets of infection”? Whatever experts call it, one thing is clear: Infections are on the rise again. Reis Thebault Washington Post

The data doesn’t look good. After weeks of decline, the average number of new coronavirus infections reported each day is higher than it’s been in a month. The number of people in hospitals with covid-19 has been stubbornly stagnant since mid-March. And even as highly contagious virus variants spread, state leaders are relaxing safety precautions.

By now, this is a familiar script. But this time around, the country’s leading epidemiologists disagree about what to call this latest phase of the pandemic. Is the United States on the cusp of a “fourth wave”? Or are we instead seeing the last gasps of a crisis in its 14th month?

Most recently, the debate played out on the Sunday morning news shows. Michael T. Osterholm, an adviser to President Biden’s coronavirus task force, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the next two weeks will bring “the highest number of cases reported globally since the beginning of the pandemic.”

“In terms of the United States, we’re just at the beginning of this surge,” said Osterholm, who is also the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “We haven’t even really begun to see it yet.”

The pandemic has been cyclical, he said. Cases pile up in the Northeast or the Midwest, subside, and then swell in the South.

“And we’re now, I think, in that cycle where the Upper Midwest is just now beginning to start this fourth surge,” Osterholm said, calling Michigan’s latest case numbers a “wake-up call.” ...

On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” former Food and Drug Administration commissioner Scott Gottlieb predicted the current spikes would not amount to “a true fourth wave,” citing the number of Americans who have already been infected, plus the number of people who have been vaccinated.

“I think that there’s enough immunity in the population that you’re not going to see a true fourth wave of infection,” Gottlieb said. “What we’re seeing is pockets of infection around the country, particularly in younger people who haven’t been vaccinated and also in school-age children.”

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