Daily Times

Observations regarding second wave of covid-19 are based on the answers that 170 medical doctors, epidemiologists, public health experts and medical researchers provided in an informal survey circulated earlier this month.

Of the 170 who answered, two-thirds stipulates that a second wave was “very likely.” A further 24 per cent said it was “somewhat likely.”

Another reason a second wave is likely is that not enough people were tainted in the first wave to produce adequate levels of immunity in the population at large.

“Second waves are predictable for airborne transmitted viral infections for several reasons, the principal being the existence of a large population of unexposed hosts,” said Tatiana Scorza, an immunologist at the Universite du Quebec a Montreal.

“If it starts increasing and not coming down over the next two weeks, I would say we’d be into a second wave,” said Mark Goldberg, an environmental epidemiologist and professor in the department of medicine at McGill University.

Benoit Masse, a professor at the school of public health at Universite de Montreal, expects infections will increase for several more weeks. The danger, he said, is in September, when schools starts open and the public begins to spend more time indoors, where the chances of infection are higher.

Dr. Brian White-Guay, a public health and family medicine specialist who teaches at Universite de Montreal said that health authorities, for example, now have a better understanding of which segments of the population are more susceptible to COVID-19 and how best to protect them from the disease.