COVID-19: As lockdowns are lifted world-wide, ‘second wave’ concerns continue to grow

“The risk of a second wave — which would hit our already fragile hospitals, which would need us to reimpose confinement and waste the efforts and sacrifices we’ve already made — is serious,” he said last week. Social distancing has proved effective in flattening the curve of new COVID-19 cases, buying health systems crucial time to recover and regroup. But it has also meant that a very small percentage of populations are likely to have been infected and thus developed immunity. France’s Pasteur Institute estimates that only around six percent of the country’s population will have been infected by May 11. Even in virus hot-spots in France, it is thought that no more than 25 percent of people caught COVID-19 during the pandemic’s first wave.

This means that without a viable vaccine, experts say it is impossible to imagine life returning to normal any time soon. “It will take several weeks or even several months to see the virus circulating again” at a high level, virologist Anne Goffard told France Inter radio. A second wave of infections was likely, she said, “at the earliest at the end of August.” But while experts are more or less united on the probability of a new spike in cases as lock-downs are eased, there is debate over how the second wave will compare with the first.  –Yahoo News

The world will never be the same again: “I’m quite certain that this is going to go in waves,” Laurie Garrett, Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Coming Plague, added. “It won’t be a tsunami that comes across America all at once and then retreats all at once. It will be micro-waves that shoot up in Des Moines and then in New Orleans and then in Houston and so on, and it’s going to affect how people think about all kinds of things.”

So, I asked, is “back to normal,” a phrase that so many people cling to, a fantasy? “This is history right in front of us,” Garrett said. “Did we go ‘back to normal’ after 9/11? No. We created a whole new normal. We securitized the United States. We turned into an antiterror state. And it affected everything. We couldn’t go into a building without showing ID and walking through a metal detector, and couldn’t get on airplanes the same way ever again. That’s what’s going to happen with this.”  –MSN