COVID-19 cases have been slowly increasing in nearly every state as the highly contagious BA.2 subvariant spreads in the U.S. Most of those cases have been relatively mild, and experts say vaccination continues to provide strong protection against severe illness. But it's the ability of the virus to change that makes arresting COVID-19 challenging.
The coordinator of the White House COVID-19 Response Team underIf you were thinking we would get back to normal and live in a world without COVID-19, think again.
"I think we're going to have flu seasons. And I think as we kind of look forward, we're going to start seeing coronavirus seasons," he said. "We should be preparing right now for a potential surge in the summer across the southern United States because we saw it in 2020, and we saw it in 2021," she warned.
"That tells me that natural immunity wanes enough in the general population after four to six months that a significant surge is going to occur again, and this is what we have to prepare for in the country," she said.