Most recently, the debate played out on the Sunday morning news shows. Michael T. Osterholm, an adviser to President Biden’s coronavirus task force, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the next two weeks will bring “the highest number of cases reported globally since the beginning of the pandemic.”

“In terms of the United States, we’re just at the beginning of this surge,” said Osterholm, who is also the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “We haven’t even really begun to see it yet.”

The pandemic has been cyclical, he said. Cases pile up in the Northeast or the Midwest, subside, and then swell in the South.

“And we’re now, I think, in that cycle where the Upper Midwest is just now beginning to start this fourth surge,” Osterholm said, calling Michigan’s latest case numbers a “wake-up call.”