The infectious disease expert warns that the new COVID-19 wave is infecting younger people

Infectious disease expert Michael Osterholm warned on Sunday of a “fourth wave” of coronavirus infections in the United States due, in part, to a more contagious variant that spreads and affects younger people.

“I think, somehow, we’re almost in a new pandemic,” Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, told Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday. “The only good news is that current vaccines are effective against this particular variant, B117.”

In addition to knowing that this variant is more contagious and deadly, Osterholm said it is more likely to affect children, an age group that during the entire pandemic had not been greatly affected by COVID-19.

“Unlike previous strains of the virus, we didn’t see children under the eighth grade get infected often or often weren’t very sick,” he said in an independent interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press”.

“Kids play a huge role in conveying this,” he told Wallace.

Osterholm said he was initially in favor of having students physically return to the classrooms, but as the virus changes, so does it.

“No country in the world right now has seen a huge increase in this B117 not blocking. We are the exception. And so the final message from all these countries is that we could not control this virus. until we had the blockade, ”he told Wallace. “We have to do a better job to help the public understand that it is short-term. All we are trying to do is overcome this wave of cases that will occur over the next six to eight or ten weeks due to this B117 variant ”.

Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a former Food and Drug Administration commissioner, also attributed new outbreaks in some states on Sunday to an increase in infections among younger people, but said he doesn’t think there will be a “true” fourth wave of cases thanks to vaccines.

“What we’re seeing are infection bags across the country, especially in younger people who haven’t been vaccinated and also in school-age children,” he told CBS News ’“ Face the Nation ”.

Gottlieb said he believes the FDA could authorize the Pfizer vaccine for emergency use for children ages 12 to 15. He does not expect, however, that it will be available to children younger than before the start of the fall school semester.

The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Rochelle Walensky, also warned last week about the feeling of “imminent destruction” due to the recent increase in the seven-day average of cases.

“When we see this rise in some cases, what we’ve seen before is that things really tend to go up and up,” he said.

The nation’s moving average of seven-day cases has been rising in recent weeks, topping 64,000 on Saturday. The last time it was so high was in early March, according to the CDC website.