'This crisis is not close to over': Epidemiologist warns against Trump's COVID-19 happy talk

President Donald Trump is already trying to push a "comeback" narrative in the United States' handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, as he's given some states the green light to reopen next month.

But Dr William Hanage, a professor of the evolution and epidemiology of infectious disease at Harvard University, thinks that it is crazy to treat the pandemic as though it's already over.

Writing in The Guardian, Hanage warns against politicians who say that we have already passed the "peak" of COVID-19 cases when the reality is that the virus appears to be far more resilient than the seasonal flu.

"What is happening right now could be just one peak -- not the peak," he writes. "And the reason for this is that despite all those positive signs from antibody testing, the huge majority of the population is not immune."

He then explains that getting to population immunity would require roughly 50 percent of people in a given country to contract the disease, which would unleash an unimaginable death toll.

"Where I live, in Cambridge Massachusetts, I keep hearing sirens," he concludes. "This crisis is not close to over, quite the reverse. The pandemic is only just getting started."

Read the whole column here.