MMR Vaccination: A Potential Strategy to Reduce Severity and Mortality of COVID-19 Illness

COVID-19, caused by SARS-CoV-2, initially reported in Wuhan, China, in December 2019 was first detected in the United States on January 20, 2020 in a long-term care facility near Seattle, Washington. The virus spread quickly, and the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020. On September 30, 2020 there were over 33.8 million cases and 1,013,000 deaths world-wide (130 deaths/million, 7.8 billion people) and over 7 million confirmed cases and 207,000 deaths in the US (621 deaths/million, 333 million people) (Data Sources; for review, see Yamamoto et al.