ICYMI on KPBS Midday Edition: Health officials initially anticipated that this year's winter surge could be mild. That appears to be changing.
, joined KPBS Midday Edition to talk about just how deadly COVID could be this holiday season. The conversation below has been lightly edited for clarity.A spike in COVID cases was expected after Thanksgiving, but is this spike worse than we thought?Yes, I think we had hoped that our immunity wall that had been built by our massive number of infections throughout the country and certainly in this region, as well as the boosters and the vaccines ... would help fend off another significant wave.
The numbers show that, in fact, more than 90% of Americans already had COVID. Vaccines should be giving us pretty strong immunity against the virus, shouldn't it?I'm troubled by that"97% had COVID" because there are other recent assessments that are using actual antibody testing, not models, and those numbers are considerably less in the 70s and 80s. I still think there are a lot of people that haven't had COVID that are vulnerable.
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