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Epidemiologist and University of Chicago Associate Professor Sarah Cobey told the "Fox News Rundown" Tuesday that life in America will not be able to fully return to normal without a vaccine for the coronavirus.
"The question really is how much can we pull back on this mitigation while not overwhelming our health care systems?" Cobey said. "And, of course, this is a new virus, we don't know exactly how it's transmitted."
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"And so we have to ... basically estimate it statistically by looking at what's happening in different populations," she added. " ... And as we see, the case counts and death counts [are] rising and falling, but we'll never be able to go back to normal until there's a vaccine."
According to Cobey, authorites will have to keep some social restrictions in place after the so-called "curve" of coronavirus infections returns to a manageable figure.
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"We're going to probably have to keep imposing some sort of restrictions on mobility or else implementing really extreme types of contact tracing in order to keep this under control until we can induce immunity to the virus artificially through vaccination," she said.
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Cobey added that the coronavirus is unlikely to go "extinct" anytime soon and compared the contagion to the seasonal flu.
"This is absolutely not SARS [which was] something that, you know, the public health community in multiple countries made enormous efforts to contain," she said. "So ultimately, it ... only infected well, about 8,000 people or so [worldwide]. And so basically the cat's out of the bag here. ... I don't think there's going to be an easy escape from this virus anytime soon."
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