Wednesday’s prediction that another 80,000 people will die this month comes as health experts rush to rush vaccinations to promote the more transmissible variants, fearing the cases could rise again.
The best way to prevent variants from dominating the pandemic, says director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, dr. Anthony Fauci, is to prevent the replication of the virus through rapid vaccination and health measures to prevent spread.
He is not currently vaccinated fast enough to reach the variants, but he is getting better and better, Fauci told NBC News on Wednesday.
According to Jay Varma, health adviser at New York, the number of variants in the US and how fast they spread can be difficult to detect due to the amount of genetic sequence it takes across the country.
“I think the safest thing to do is that we are of the assumption that there are many more cases than we know,” Varma said.
Given the unknowns about the variants and the time it takes to get the US on a herd immunity threshold with vaccines, dr. Ricardo Franco of the Center for AIDS Research at the University of Alabama in Birmingham said it was not the time to give. on masks.
“This game is halftime,” Franco said. “We have to keep pushing and not give the virus a chance to play well in the second half.”
New vaccines offer hope
Two more vaccines could soon take part in the fight against the virus.
In the preview posted by Oxford University researchers on Tuesday, the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine showed 66.7% efficacy against symptomatic diseases, starting two weeks after the second shot. Oxford researchers have also suggested that the vaccine may reduce the transmission of the virus, rather than reduce the severity of the disease.
“I certainly have every reason to believe the British, but I would like to see the data for myself,” Fauci told NBC Savannah Guthrie about the data, which has not yet been reviewed by peers.
However, if it is true that it stops the transmission, he said: “This is good news, you know, yet another vaccine candidate in the mix.”
The data suggests that the vaccine could reduce transmission by as much as two-thirds, “which is a wonderful discovery if true,” Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet, told CNN’s Becky Anderson on Wednesday.
The Lancet is currently conducting a scientific peer review of the research.
Meanwhile, a Johnson & Johnson vaccine candidate has become the third to obtain emergency use authorization from the FDA and is currently being reviewed.
“We could literally see within a week that they would finally get the kind of permits for emergency use,” Fauci told NBC News.
School districts and teachers are at odds over reopening
Meanwhile, lawsuits and threats of strikes have led to pressure to get students back into the classroom amid the pandemic.
The CDC director, dr. Rochelle Walensky, however, said Wednesday that data is increasingly supporting the safety of returning to schools under the right conditions.
With a weekly screening of students, teachers and staff using rapid antigen testing, schools could reduce their infections by 50% for high schools and 35% for elementary schools, according to a new study by the Rockefeller Foundation.
But many cities feel frustrated because schools or teachers are reluctant to return.
Chicago schools were supposed to bring students back to campus Monday, but negotiations between the district and teachers are ongoing to avoid a strike.
In Minneapolis, after a weekend decision that teachers could not be forced to return to personal learning if they had earlier asked for housing to work remotely, the public school district continues with plans to open classes for the pre-K to resume to the fifth. pupils on Monday. More than half of the families chose to have their students learn at a distance.
The city of San Francisco sued its own school district on Wednesday for failing to open schools.
“The undisputed scientific consensus is that schools can safely reopen for teachers, staff and students with proper precautions, and that personal education does not cause spikes in Covid-19 infections. Let’s follow science and open school doors,” City Attorney said. Dennis Herrera said at a virtual news conference.
Black and Hispanic people in the U.S. have been vaccinated less disproportionately
Although black and Hispanic Americans are affected by an excessively higher percentage of coronavirus, they receive fewer vaccinations, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s analysis.
More than 20 states now report Covid-19 vaccination data by race or ethnicity, and there are inequalities in Covid-19 vaccination in all, according to the analysis.
Blacks received a smaller share of vaccinations than their share in Covid-19 cases in all 23 who reported the data, and the same was true for Hispanics in all 21 states who reported the data.
In most of the states, black and Hispanic people also received a smaller share of Covid-19 vaccinations than their share of deaths, with Vermont and Missouri as exceptions.
In Vermont, the proportion of vaccinations among black people was equal to the proportion of deaths in Covid-19 among black people, and in Vermont and Missouri, the proportion of vaccinations among Hispanics was higher than the proportion in Covid-19 deaths among Hispanics.
A CNN analysis of government vaccination data last week found that vaccine coverage is on average twice as high as among black and Hispanic people.
CNN’s Ben Tinker, Haley Brink, Naomi Thomas, Kristina Sgueglia, Christopher Rios, John Bonifield, Elizabeth Stuart, Dan Simon, Augie Martin, Jen Christensen and Deidre McPhillips contributed to this report.