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MONDAY, Sept. 21, 2020 (HealthDay News) — As the U.S. COVID-19 case count neared 200,000 on Monday, public health experts debated whether the spread of the virus will continue to slow or a new surge will come, as cold weather returns to much of the country.<\/p>\n
“What will happen, nobody knows,” Catherine Troisi, Ph.D., an infectious disease epidemiologist at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, told The New York Times<\/i>. “This virus has surprised us on many fronts, and we may be surprised again.”<\/p>\n
In the United States, fewer new COVID-19 cases have been detected week by week since late July, but the nation’s daily count of new cases has started to climb again in recent days, The Times<\/i> reported. Meanwhile, at least 73 other countries are seeing second surges in new cases.<\/p>\n
Tom Inglesby, M.D., director of the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, told The Times<\/i> it was conceivable that the death toll in the United States could reach 300,000 if Americans start to relax social distancing measures.<\/p>\n
As case counts started trending upward again, 1,400 public schools in New York City reopened Monday for nearly 90,000 pre-K students and children with advanced disabilities. The remaining 1 million students will start their school year online, with the option of returning to classrooms in the next few weeks, The Times<\/i> reported.<\/p>\n