Years from now, when 2020 is a distant memory, a face mask will still dangle from your rear-view mirror, one epidemiologist predicts.
“As long as any of your readers are alive, we’ll have some form of COVID,” said Andrew Noymer, an epidemiologist and demographer at UC Irvine, whose crystal ball on the pandemic has been unnervingly accurate.
“That’s not to suggest we’re going to have half-a-million deaths a year and clog emergency departments. Things will settle down — mostly on the back of a million dead Americans who can’t die twice, disproportionally people who lost the genetic lottery and have some cell receptor that’s particularly interactive with this virus.
“But COVID is going to be here,” he said. “There won’t be masking orders coming down from the government, but some will have masks dangling from their rear-view mirrors for the rest of their lives.”
