One of the country’s top U.S. health officials issued a stark warning about a potential second coronavirus wave on the same day that clinical drug trials for a treatment recorded promising signs.
On Wednesday, the results of a trial on the drug remdesivir showed “clear-cut, significant, positive effect in diminishing the time to recovery.” The same day, Dr. Anthony Fauci said he expects an “inevitable” second wave of the virus in the fall and winter months.
“It’s inevitable that the coronavirus will return next season. … When it does, how we handle it will determine our fate,” the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases told NBC.
As some states reopen their economies after a month or longer under “shelter-in-place” orders, Fauci said he was concerned the virus could reactivate if certain measures are not taken to stunt the disease’s spread.
“If by that time we have put into place all of the countermeasures that you need to address this, we should do reasonably well,” Fauci told CNN. “If we don’t do that successfully, we could be in for a bad fall and a bad winter.”
According to Johns Hopkins University’s coronavirus tracker, over 1 million people in the United States have contracted the disease, with over 59,000 dead as a result of the virus.
