A doctor at Johns Hopkins is making a bold prediction about COVID-19 in the United States: that it will be “mostly gone” by April, which is merely two months away.
Dr. Marty Makary wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal on Friday. Makary is a surgeon and professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Bloomberg School of Public Health.
In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal published on Friday, Dr. Makary argues that there are actually many more than the 28 million confirmed cases of COVID in the U.S. He thinks there could be possibly as much as 6.5 times more than the number. He says between that group and the roughly 15 percent of the country that’s had one dose the vaccine, much of the nation is already protected.
Makary even appeared on Fox News on Friday to talk about his op-ed points:
“There is reason to think the country is racing toward an extremely low level of infection,” Makary wrote in the op-ed. “As more people have been infected, most of whom have mild or no symptoms, there are fewer Americans left to be infected. At the current trajectory, I expected Covid will be mostly gone by April, allowing Americans to resume normal life.”
“There’s a 76 percent reduction in daily cases over the last six weeks,” he said on TV. “You, as a scientist, have to ask why. And we cannot explain that by vaccinated immunity. We can’t explain it by a sudden change in behavior. It’s natural immunity, and it’s now over 50 percent of the population.”