COVID-19 Second Wave Is Expected to Hit America by Fall

Moreover, COVID-19 has been very hard for certain universities, forcing them to make major scheduling decisions and changes. For example, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill decided to move all their classes online the first semester, as a result of 130 students who tested positive for the virus. Further analysis of testing among 954 students showed than more than 13 percent of them tested positive for COVID-19.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and the COVID-19 pandemic is definitely one of those situations. Many universities across the country are doing everything in their power to make it a safe place for students and teachers, but they can only do so much, such as limiting dorm occupancy and class sizes, providing every class with sanitizer and disinfecting surfaces several times a day. However, that still might not be enough, what students do outside campus is also very important.

“The university does not govern what happens off-campus,” says Juan Marquez, medical director in Ann Arbor’s Washtenaw County. “They can only do so much.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, White House advisor and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told The Washington Post that the second wave of COVID-19 should be expected by fall.

″[The second wave is] going to depend on your capability and your effectiveness when you do get these little blips of infection, which we will invariably get, that you have the systems, the testing, the manpower to do the identification, isolation and contact tracing,” he said. “If you do, it is not inevitable that you’re going to have a second wave in the fall.”

He also added that the second wave might be even harder than the first one, as people are already tired of social distancing and other safety measures that must be taken. Moreover, a second wave that coincides with the flu season can be very dangerous for the health system in America.

“The real risk is that we’re going to have two circulating respiratory pathogens at the same time,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Dr, Robert Redfield said.