Dr. Rochelle Walensky, former president of the United States, Joe Biden, to run the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), listens as Biden announces nominees and candidates to serve on his health and coronavirus response teams during a news conference in its headquarters for transition. 10 weather forecast for Wilmington, Delaware.
Kevin Lamarque | Reuters
Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Sunday it was too early for states to lift masked mandates, given the high number of daily cases and deaths in the U.S. coronavirus.
“We still have 100,000 cases a day. We still have between 1,500 and 3,500 deaths a day,” Walensky said in an interview on CBS ‘Face the Nation. “And yet we are seeing some communities relax some of their mitigation strategies. We are nowhere out of the woods.”
As the spread of the virus in the US slowed down and the explosion of the vaccine accelerated, states began to relax restrictions. Republican governors in Montana and Iowa this month lifted the requirements for wearing a mask. North Dakota’s mask mandate expired in January.
In New York, Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo recently allowed indoor dining at 25%, despite the high risk of contamination in indoor spaces, and opened stadiums and arenas with limited capacity.
The U.S. reports an average of more than 93,000 cases a day, 22% lower than a week ago and more than 3,000 deaths daily, up 4% from a week ago, according to a CNBC data analysis from Johns Hopkins University .
The daily average deaths in Covid may have increased over the past week due to some states conducting audits and deaths not previously reported.
More than 480,000 people in the US have died from the virus and more than 27 million have been infected.
Health experts fear that the rapid spread of more contagious variants could lead to a new increase in cases and deaths in the US. Cases of the more contagious variant first found in Britain, known as B.1.1.7, double approximately every ten days in the country.
“If we relax these mitigation strategies with increasingly transferable variants out there, we could be in a much more difficult place,” Walensky said. “Now is the time to put our guard down. Now is the time to double down.”
Health officials are urging Americans to put on and double down on masks, which provide significant protection against viral transmission. Recent research by the CDC suggests that well-worn surgical masks or doubling with a surgical and cloth mask reduces the risk of transmission by up to 96%.
“We need to get our communities back to normal before we can start thinking about mitigating our mitigation strategies,” Walensky said.