Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, Michael Osterholm said on Sunday that a more infectious ‘B117’ variant could cause a “fourth wave” of COVID-19 spread in the United States. 

The new variant is most likely to affect younger children, a generation that had largely not been impacted by COVID-19 previously. 

“I believe that, in some ways, we’re almost in a new pandemic. The only good news is that the current vaccines are effective against this particular variant, B117,” Osterholm said during an interview with Fox News. 

“We are now seeing increasing number of severe illnesses [and] ICU hospitalizations in individuals 30 to 50 years of age who have not been vaccinated,” he added, reported Huffpost. 

Also read: Why is it necessary to wear a mask even after vaccination?

In another interview with NBC, he said, “Unlike the previous strains of the virus, we didn’t see children under eighth grade get infected often, or they were not frequently very ill. Kids are playing a huge role in the transmission of this.”

Even though Osterholm had previously said that he is in favour of children returning back to schools physically, he has now changed his stance because of the new variant.

He added, “There isn’t a country in the world right now that has seen a big increase of this B117 that is not locking down. We’re the exception. And so the bottom line message from all of these countries is, we could not control this virus until we did lockdown. We have to do a better job of helping the public understand that this is short term.”

“All we’re trying to do is get through this surge of cases that are going to occur over the next six to eight to 10 weeks because of this B117 variant.”

Also read: COVID-19 patients can be classified into 3 types: Researchers

The director of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention already gave a warning last week. Rochelle Walensky talked of an “impending doom” feeling amid the rise in the average of cases in the past seven days. 

She said, “When we see that uptick in cases, what we’ve seen before is that things really have a tendency to surge and surge big.”

Scott Gottlieb, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration said during an interview with CBS News, “What we’re seeing is pockets of infection around the country, particularly in younger people who haven’t been vaccinated and also in school-aged children.”

In addition to this variant being known to be more contagious and deadly, Osterholm said it is more likely to affect children, an age group that throughout the pandemic had been largely unaffected by COVID-19.