“Four weeks ago, the B.1.1.7 variant accounted for about 1 to 4% of the virus we saw in communities across the country. Today it is up to 30 to 40%,” said Osterholm, director of the Center. for Research and Policy on Infectious Diseases at the University of Minnesota, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday.
“What we saw in Europe when we reached the 50% mark, you see cases rising,” he said.
Here’s what we know about the B.1.1.7 variant
Although there are different variants of coronavirus in the US, experts are particularly concerned about the dangerous potential of the highly contagious B.1.1.7 variant.
To date, the agency has reported more than 2,600 known cases of the variant in 46 states, Puerto Rico and Washington DC. Nearly a quarter of cases are in Florida. But the CDC said it probably does not represent the total number of such cases in the U.S., but only the cases found by analyzing positive samples, using genomic sequencing.
The specialist and epidemiologist, dr. Celine Gounder, told CNN on Sunday she was at an emergency meeting held by a group of experts on Christmas Eve to discuss the variant.
“We have been watching it very closely ever since,” she said. “Where it hit in the UK and now elsewhere in Europe, it was really catastrophic. It has increased the number of hospitalizations and deaths and it is very difficult to control.”
“It looks like we ran this very long marathon, and we are 100 meters from the finish line and we sit down, and we give up,” Gounder said on Sunday. “We are almost there, we just need to give a little more time to cover a larger part of the population with vaccinations.”
‘It’s not just about personal choice’
On Sunday, Reeves defended his decision, saying it would be an unrealistic goal to free the state of Covid-19 cases altogether, and that Covid-19 numbers officials were concerned.
“We take a closer look at hospitalizations from a given point of view, the number of Mississippians in the ICU, the number of Mississippians on fans … all those numbers have dropped in our state over the past two months,” he told CNN.
Reeves said the state tried to protect lives, but also to protect livelihoods. ‘
“We need to get our economy going so that individuals can get back to work, and I think that’s critical,” he said.
And even without mask mandates, the governor said he recommended residents and ‘strongly’ encouraged wearing masks.
Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, told ABC that the state is responsible for keeping mask mandates in place.
‘It’s not just about personal choice, it’s like I would drink and get behind the wheel of a car, it’s not just a personal choice that I would risk my life, but that I’m people’s lives are in danger, ”Jha said.
“Wearing a mask not only protects you, but you protect people around you,” he added.
Less than 10% of Americans are fully vaccinated
More than 30.6 million received two doses, the data show. That’s about 9.2% of the U.S. population.
But officials are hopeful that vaccinations will increase in the coming months through increased supply.
“We will have enough vaccines, I think we have told 300 million Americans,” Slavitt said Sunday. “There are currently 250 million adults in the country, and as we know, most teenagers are not eligible, and younger children are not eligible, so that’s more than enough for every adult.”
Slavitt added that vaccines are now going “very, very fast” from factories to weapons, and that the country is becoming more efficient at administering the doses.
And the country’s high school students, according to Fauci, could be vaccinated by the fall, while younger students will likely have to wait a little longer.
“At the moment, tests are being done to determine safety and comparable immunogenicity in high school students,” Fauci told CBS ‘Face the Nation on Sunday. “We plan that high school students can most likely be vaccinated by the fall period, perhaps not the very first day, but certainly in the early part of the fall for the fall period.”
CNN’s Nadia Kounang, Naomi Thomas and Artemis Moshtaghian contributed to this report.