[ad_1]
Dr Scott Gottlieb told CNBC on Monday that he believes coronavirus cases in the United States will continue to decline in the spring and summer, allowing Americans to relax some pandemic precautions for now.
However, in an interview with “Squawk Box,” the former Food and Drug Administration commissioner stopped short of agreeing completely with the recent Wall Street Journal editorial titled “We’ll Have Heard Immunity From ‘here April’. It was written by Dr Marty Makary, a professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and has sparked discussion since its publication Thursday.
Covid cases in the United States have fallen 77% in the past six weeks, Makary notes in the article, and he argues that the decline is largely due to the population’s level of natural immunity US is “almost certainly” higher than antibody studies suggest. Taking this into account with the pace of vaccinations, Makary writes: “I expect Covid to be mostly gone by April, allowing Americans to resume normal lives.”
Gottlieb said he didn’t “necessarily agree” with some of the numbers Makary used to support his argument, but added, “I think the sentiment is fair.”
Makary writes that about 55% of people in the country have natural immunity to a previous coronavirus infection. While agreeing that the total of 28.1 million cases confirmed in the United States by Johns Hopkins is an undercount, Gottlieb told CNBC he believes around 120 million people – or about 36% of the American population – have been infected with the coronavirus throughout the pandemic.
After taking vaccination data into account, Gottlieb estimated that around 40% of U.S. residents currently have antibodies from previous infection or inoculation – a percentage that will increase as more people are vaccinated. According to the CDC, 43.6 million Americans who have received at least one dose of the two Covid vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer since receiving emergency use clearance from the FDA in December.
“When you reach 40% or 50% of the population with some form of protective immunity, you don’t have collective immunity but you have enough immunity in the population for that to happen. [virus] just doesn’t transfer that easily, ”Gottlieb said.
“I think as we get into the warmer weather, as we vaccinate the population more and considering that at least a third of Americans have suffered from it, I think infection levels will drop dramatically as we go. during the spring and summer, ”Gottlieb said.
White House chief medical adviser Dr Anthony Fauci has previously said that 75% to 85% of the population would need to develop immunity to create an “umbrella” of protection. CDC officials also recently said more than 85% of people should be covered to get so-called herd immunity if a rapidly spreading variant of the virus, such as B117, which was first reported in the UK Uni, became the dominant strain. in the USA
The presence of more contagious virus variants means that parts of the United States have higher infection rates this summer “than they otherwise would have been,” Gottlieb added. “But I don’t think it changes the overall trajectory.”
If that trajectory holds and it’s a “low prevalence environment” in the coming months, Gottlieb said he expects children to be able to safely attend a summer camp, for example. . “I think people are going to come out and do a lot of things this summer, a lot of pent-up demand for consumer spending,” he said.
“I think in the fall we’ll have to take some precautions, but we’re going to get back to doing things. Then as we go into deep winter as it starts to flow again… I think December will come. , we can start to back down, “Gottlieb said.” That doesn’t mean we’re going to have closures and do what we did [past] December, but that means we might not have a holiday party, board meetings in December could be Zoom rather than face-to-face meetings. “
Gottlieb stressed that he believes the US resumption of the pandemic will not be a “linear progression,” where the risk of coronavirus steadily decreases month after successive month. The winter months could be more difficult because it is a respiratory pathogen, he warned. “Once winter is back in 2021, 2022, we will have to take some precautions. I think if there will be a normal period in the next 12 months, it will probably be this spring and summer.”
Disclosure: Scott Gottlieb is a CNBC contributor and is a member of the board of directors of Pfizer, a genetic testing start-up Tempus, Aetion health technology company and biotechnology company Illumina. He is also co-chair of Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings‘and Royal Caribbean‘s “Healthy Sail Panel.
[ad_2]
Source link