But the new coronavirus strain’s behavior is still too mysterious to predict for certain.

Some other respiratory illnesses do this: During the 2009 swine-flu outbreak, cases surged in the spring, subsided over the summer, then returned with a vengeance in the autumn. Scientists don’t yet know if the coronavirus will fade away during the summer before making a resurgence in colder temperatures. “It’s going to be a very difficult fall and winter this year coming up,” says Ashish Jha, the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute. In combination with the normal, October-through-March flu season, the disease could strain hospital capacity even more than it did this spring, when flu season was petering out. Numerous public-health experts are concerned that COVID-19 might make a comeback this fall (assuming that total case numbers even drop to begin with).

He’s also far from the only person who believes that the United States is in for a bleak winter. President Trump later tried to claim that Redfield had been misquoted, but Redfield clarified that he was quoted accurately. “We’re going to have the flu epidemic and the coronavirus epidemic at the same time.” “There’s a possibility that the assault of the virus on our nation next winter will actually be even more difficult than the one we just went through,” Redfield told The Washington Post on Tuesday. If you held out a glimmer of hope about life returning to normal this year, that hope may have been thoroughly extinguished this week by the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Robert Redfield.

Will there be another lockdown