U.S. health officials have warned America that it’s not time to relax even as new COVID cases fell below 50,000 nationwide for the first time since October 18.
At a press conference on Monday, Dr Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said she was ‘deeply concerned’ as some states roll back COVID-19 restrictions.
She noted that current figures shows national case counts have flattened off at around 70,000 per day and deaths at around 2,000.
‘I am really worried that states are rolling back the same restrictions that helped us. We cannot be resigned to 70,000 cases a day, 2,000 daily deaths,’ she told reporters.
‘At this level of cases, we stand to lose the hard-earned ground we have gained…This is the not the time to relax critical safeguards…We have the potential to stop the surge of cases. Stay strong in convictions.’
It comes after nearly half of all states – 20 and the District of Columbia – reported a rise in case for the first time in more than a month, according to a DailyMail.com analysis of Johns Hopkins data. On Sunday, the U.S. recorded 51,204 infections, a decline of 5.4 percent over last week, one of the slowest declines seen over the last fee weeks. There were also 1,097 daily deaths recorded in the last 24 hours.
However, on Monday, cases dipped again to less than 50,000 for the first time since October, with just 48,092 new reported, according to the Covid Tracking Project, and 1,241 deaths. The figures were based on 45 states as five had not reported at the time they were published.
It comes as the country saw a record 306 new coronavirus variant infections on Sunday. Health officials say cases have increase five-fold over the month of February – and nearly all of the new cases were in Florida, Michigan or Texas.
A homegrown variant that first appeared in New York is stirring increasing concern among officials, including Fauci, who highlighted at a press briefing the fact that it appears to evade either antibodies from prior infection or those triggered by vaccines.
However, laboratories that run tests to determine if coronavirus samples are variants are not allowed to tell patients if they are infected with a mutant strain due to federal rules that control what information labs can share.
Dr Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said on Monday she was ‘deeply concerned’ as some states roll back COVID-19 restrictions
Meanwhile, on Sunday, Dr Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, also expressed his concern.
Over the past week, the nation recorded multiple days of daily news cases around 70,000. Despite plunging from a high of nearly 300,000, Fauci said it’s not enough.
‘We’ve been in this situation before, when you start to see a decline in number of cases, if you prematurely lift the restrictions, we have a few examples of the rebound back,’ Fauci, the director for the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease said on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday.
‘Our baseline of daily infections now, even though it’s way down from where it was, 300,000-plus per day, is down to around 70,000. That baseline’s too high.
‘Let’s keep our feet on the accelerator right now, because we are going in the right direction.’
Fauci also said he would take any of the vaccines that are approved in the U.S. – Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna or Johnson & Johnson – because all showed protection against severe disease and death.
Fauci (pictured) encouraged that Americans get whichever vaccine is available to them after J&J’s shot received emergency use authorization from the FDA last month
‘All three of them are really quite good, and people should take the one that’s most available to them,’ he told NBC.
‘If you go to a place and you have J&J and that’s the one that’s available now, I would take it. I personally would do the same thing. I think people need to get vaccinated as quickly and as expeditiously as possible.’
On Saturday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized the J&J one-shot vaccine for emergency use one day after an independent panel of advisors recommended that it be approved.
The inoculation was found to be 86 percent effective at preventing serious disease overall with 72 percent efficacy in the U.S. and 64 percent in South Africa.
By comparison, Pfizer’s vaccine as well as Moderna’s are about 95 percent effective at preventing severe disease.
‘It’s not the weaker vaccine. They are all three really good vaccines,’ Fauci told NBC.
The first doses of J&J’s long-awaited one-dose COVID-19 vaccine began shipping overnight, and the first shots could be given as early as tomorrow, the firm’s CEO said Monday.
‘We think literally between the next 24 to 48 hours, Americans should start receiving shots and arms,’ said Alex Gorsky on NBC’s Today.
J&J started shipping four million doses of America’s third coronavirus vaccine overnight on Sunday, after it received emergency authorization from the FDA.
On Monday, cases dipped again to less than 50,000 for the first time since October, with just 48,092 new reported, according to the Covid Tracking Project, and 1,241 deaths
J&J’s vaccine was approve for emergency use authorization, which should help boost the number of daily vaccinations even higher than the current average of 1.7 million per day
Vaccine rollout is picking up speed across the U.S., with about 15% of the population having received one or more doses
It comes after the firm hit production delays, forcing it to walk back its original pledge to deliver 10 million doses in its first shipments, but CEO Alex Gorsky said J&J can ‘absolutely’ meet its new delivery goal.
J&J still thinks it can deliver 100 million doses of the vaccine by July. Combined with the promised doses from Moderna and Pfizer, that would give the US enough vaccine to inoculate every adult in the nation.
The firm’s highly-anticipated vaccine couldn’t come soon enough. After six weeks of promising declines in COVID-19 case numbers, there are signs the trend may be stalling.
Vaccine rollout is picking up speed across the U.S., where 15 percent of the population has now had one or more doses, according to Bloomberg data.
But the race to inoculate Americans is heating up, too, as the nation tries to out outpace the spread of highly infectious variants from the UK, South Africa and Brazil, as well as its own homegrown mutant forms of coronavirus.
Cases of the coronavirus variants in the U.S. increased five-fold over the month of February from 471 to 2,463 across 47 states, with a high number of cases reported on Sunday at 306
It comes as the U.S. reported a record-high number of coronavirus variant cases on Sunday at 306.
The majority of the increase was seen in three states: Florida, Michigan and Texas. Florida saw an increase of 104 cases to a total of 605, Michigan was up 85 cases to 421, and Texas saw a rise of 41 cases to 102.
At least 2,400 cases are linked to B.1.1.7, which was first seen in the UK and that the CDC says will become the dominant strain in March.
Over the month of February, the nation has seen variant infections increase five-fold from 471 to 2,463 across 47 states.
However, laboratory officials say they cannot tell patients or their physicians if they have been infected with a mutant strain.
The tests needed for detecting variants, known as genome sequencing tests, have not been authorized by the FDA as a diagnostic tool, according to Kaiser Health News.
What’s more, there are federal rules which dictate what information university labs can report and to whom, meaning health officials counties don’t even know which counties in states have cases.
The testing is only performed by certain labs that are not required to tell patients or doctors their results.
Recently, a new study found that every coronavirus variant of concern has been circulating in Houston at a low level for at least six to eight weeks, The New York Times reported.
This makes Houston the first city in the country to not only find all the variants that have come from abroad but also homegrown variants first seen in New York and California.
The findings highlight how the true prevalence of the variants are all unknown and how there are no surveillance measures in place to track their fast spread.
