Anthony Fauci, who said people in the US should expect to "hunker down" in the upcoming fall and winter months.

"It's not going to be easy," Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said last week during a panel discussion with Harvard Medical School.

Osterholm said he and Fauci were "on the same page," pointing to the roughly 40,000 new cases of the novel coronavirus that are diagnosed each day.

According to a Sunday tally from Johns Hopkins University, there have so far been at least 6,492,744 cases of the novel coronavirus in the US, resulting in more than 190,00 deaths.

"And then," Osterholm said, "it's going to take us months to vaccinate the population of just this country.".

"We really have another 12 to 14 months of a really hard road ahead of us," Osterholm continued?