COVID-19 pandemic won’t be over by New Year’s eve, academician says

It is possible that the seasonal outbreaks will continue, he said before his 80th anniversary in an interview with the Future of Russia/National Projects portal, operated by TASS.

«Infections by [their] definition will never be over. If not this one, there will be another, and anyway you and I will never live completely without infections. If there were 400,000 incidences of the disease worldwide in two days, yet the WHO says that we haven’t reached the peak yet, then the plateau on the pandemic scale is still ahead of us. People travel by plane, the globalization, so really before New Year’s nothing will be over for sure, and possibly, there will be seasonal outbreaks like it is happening already in Spain or Israel - 200-400 incidences each,» he said.

The academician noted as well, that it is difficult to forecast yet whether there will be a new wave of infection or not. «It is hard to tell whether there will be this wave of incidence or not. In Russia now every day there are a bit over 6,000 infections and it cannot be that tomorrow the growth will be 500 people or, to the contrary, 12,000. This is a phased and gradual process, not an instantaneous one,» he added.