After Crowded Memorial Day Celebrations, Mass. General Vaccine Chief Warns Coronavirus Is Still ‘Highly Infectious and Transmissible’

From a crowded pool party at Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri to a street party in Daytona Beach, Florida, Memorial Day festivities brought hundreds close together in several U.S. cities Monday ⁠— largely without masks or other such precautions.

But while behaviors related to the pandemic have changed in recent days, the director of the Vaccine and Immunotherapy Center at Massachusetts General Hospital said the coronavirus itself is still very much the same.

“The virus is what it was previously: highly infectious and transmissible from one person to others over short distance,” Dr. Mark Poznansky told Jim Braude on WGBH News’ Greater Boston Tuesday.