UK PM warns of COVID-19 second wave

The novel coronavirus that apparently originated from a seafood market in Wuhan is wreaking havoc in all nooks of the planet. As per the latest statistics, the virus has already claimed the lives of more than 6,00,000 people worldwide, and the total number of infected patients has crossed 14.4 million. Adding up to the already existing worries, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Boris Johnson has warned about a possible second wave of the virus that could hit the country during next winter.

According to Johnson, coronavirus could become more virulent in winter, and the works of NHS will become more challenging to cope up the rise in positive cases.

“Demand for testing is not the only challenge that winter will bring. It’s possible that the virus will be more virulent in the winter months and it’s certain that the NHS will face the usual annual winter pressures,” said Johnson.

A few weeks back, Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute and professor of health policy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health had warned that the real chaos associated with COVID-19 is yet to unfold. According to Jha, the coronavirus outbreak is still in its early stages, and the pandemic could challenge the entire healthcare sector if it starts spreading in rural areas.

It should be noted that coronavirus had initially spread among people in urban areas, and now, the pandemic has slowly started affecting people living in suburbs and rural areas.

“The nature of this pandemic is that it starts and kind of accelerates in big cities, but then it moves out into the suburbs and into the rural areas. So, by the time we’re done with this, I think every American will have felt it much more up close and personal. That’s what I worry about — that it shouldn’t have to take that for people to really understand how tragic this is and how calamitous in many ways this is,” said Jha.