The Covid-19 Pandemic Has Only Just Begun
Why every U.S. city and county should brace for severe outbreaks, a possible second wave, and even a resurgence of the coronavirus later this year and next
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While the worst Covid-19 outbreaks in the United States so far have occurred in a relative handful of large cities and other locales, experts say the steep rise in cases — the curve — will come to communities large and small across the country in coming days and weeks. Already some rural counties are seeing outbreaks.
For just about everyone else, it’s a matter of time.
And this may be just the first wave of a pandemic that could return in multiple seasons, all depending on whether it can be contained by physical distancing, a potential vaccine, or other preventive measures.
“This is an extraordinarily transmissible virus, and I think it’s more transmissible than we recognize,” says Michael Mina, assistant professor of epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Mina has “little faith” in the accuracy or extent of Covid-19 testing so far. Between people who are sick but have not been tested and the unknown number of people carrying the disease without any symptoms and transmitting it, Mina and other epidemiologists says it’s completely unknown how many people are actually infected.
“We really don’t know if we’ve been 10 times off or 100 times off in terms of the cases,” Mina says. “Personally, I lean more to 50 or 100 times off.”
That means instead of more than a million cases in the world right now, there could be anywhere from 10 million to perhaps 100 million. That also means the extreme preventive measures like stay-at-home orders could last months, not weeks, Jeremy Konyndyk, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, tells the health news site Stat.
Few doubt that the effects will be grave, no matter what the actual number of cases is right now.
Total U.S. deaths from Covid-19 are projected to climb steeply in coming weeks and reach 93,531 by August 4, according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), an independent global health research…
