WASHINGTON – Biden administration officials warned this week of a “worrying” rise in Covid-19 cases and urged Americans not to give up, despite an ongoing vaccination campaign and the significantly lower rate lower than their peak last month.
“We may be done with the virus, but the virus is clearly not done with us,” Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told a White House press conference. “I know people are tired and want to get back to normal, but we are not there yet.”
Walensky’s tone shift comes after a slight but significant upheaval in reported Covid-19 cases. Health officials have reported more than 70,000 cases each of the past three days, the first increase after about seven weeks’ number of cases dropped.
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The current total is dramatically lower than mid-January, when the country recorded more than 250,000 every day. But it is still high – more than double the initial outbreak in 2020, which saw about 30,000 cases daily in April, and an increase in July, by about 65,000.
“We at CDC see this as a very worrying shift in the trajectory,” Walensky said. ‘The most recent seven-day average, around 66,350, is higher than the average I shared with you on Wednesday. In fact, business has increased over the past three days compared to the previous week. ”
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Walensky has sounded the alarm, although according to CDC data, the US still administers about 1.3 million doses of vaccines every day. The country has already distributed more than 68 million doses of vaccines, and about 14% of Americans have received at least one dose of the two-dose vaccine regimen.
However, most Americans are unlikely to be vaccinated for months, leaving large sections of the population susceptible to the virus, which has already resulted in more than 500,000 U.S. deaths.
Officials also warned that new variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes Covid-19, could reverse the U.S. pandemic response if Americans let their hats down. Anthony Fauci, the government researcher and chief medical adviser to Biden’s pandemic response, warned that the encouraging news of February could be erased if the case counts at their current level, instead of declining further.
“If we have at 70,000 plateau, we are in that very precarious position where we fall before the fall,” he said. “We do not want to be people who always look at the dark side of things, but you want to be realistic.”
The information in the White House came when a Food and Drug Administration committee considered recommending the authorization for a new vaccine developed by Johnson & Johnson.
“More vaccine is on the way,” Walensky said. “We’re about to have another vaccine in our toolbox.”
However, the trial also contains its own warning, especially with regard to the presence of new and possibly more transmissible variants of the virus, especially three that were first discovered in Brazil, South Africa and the United Kingdom.
“We have to assume, in the absence of other information, that these variants are likely to exist throughout the United States,” said Adam MacNeil, a CDC epidemiologist.
The US, he added, is currently a nowhere near a herd immunity.
Despite concerns about the new variant, Fauci urged Americans to be vaccinated as soon as possible, even though he stressed the ongoing trials of drug manufacturer Moderna to determine whether a possible ‘booster’ shot specifically against can protect the South African variant.
“Get vaccinated,” Fauci said. “The vaccine that is available to you – get the vaccine.”
Matthew Herper reported.