One of the nation’s top public health officials said Monday that the Biden administration was seeking “to avoid lockdowns at all costs” amid a precipitous rise in cases of the Covid-19 Delta variant that has prompted a reversal of federal masking guidance and resulted in more stringent coronavirus-related orders across the country.
Urging greater numbers of people to get vaccinated, Francis Collins — director of the National Institutes of Health — reported that “most of the projections say we’re in for a really tough August, September, October,” and warned Americans would be forced to adopt unpopular mitigation measures to stave off the widespread lockdown directives that the country endured earlier in the pandemic.
“We want to avoid lockdowns at all costs,” Collins told ABC’s “Good Morning America” in an interview. “But that means we’re going to have to do some other things that won’t necessarily be welcomed by people, such as the new recommendation of wearing masks in indoor gatherings, even if you’re vaccinated.”
Skirting new shutdowns will also “mean schools really need to have kids masked, so that they’re protected from being the source of spreading, as well,” Collins said, adding: “But if we want to avoid a more severe outcome that might lead to more extreme measures like lockdowns, we know what to do. We just need to do it.”
The remarks from Collins echo an assessment made on Sunday by his most prominent colleague, Anthony Fauci — President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at Collins’ NIH.
“I don’t think we’re going to see lockdowns,” Fauci told ABC’s “This Week” in an interview. “I think we have enough of the percentage of people in the country — not enough to crush the outbreak — but I believe enough to not allow us to get into the situation we were in last winter.”
Still, Fauci acknowledged that “things are going to get worse” in the U.S. fight against the coronavirus, and he cautioned that the country will be “looking to some pain and suffering in the future” due to the combination of unvaccinated Americans and the surge of the Delta variant.
The current seven-day moving average of daily new coronavirus cases in the United States is 66,606, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — more than a 64 percent increase compared with the previous seven-day moving average of 40,597 cases. Additionally, the proportion of U.S. cases attributed to the Delta variant is predicted to increase to more than 82 percent.
Just less than half of all Americans, 49.6 percent, have been fully vaccinated as of Sunday, according to the CDC, while 57.7 percent of the total U.S. population has received at least one dose of vaccine.
Last Tuesday, the CDC recommended that both vaccinated and unvaccinated Americans wear masks indoors again if they live in areas where the agency has classified Covid-19 transmission as “high” or “substantial.” The CDC had previously declared in May that vaccinated Americans no longer needed to wear masks outdoors or indoors in most circumstances.
"want" - Google News
August 02, 2021 at 07:43PM
https://ift.tt/3C80ATB
NIH director: ‘We want to avoid lockdowns at all costs’ - POLITICO
"want" - Google News
https://ift.tt/31yeVa2
https://ift.tt/2YsHiXz
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "NIH director: ‘We want to avoid lockdowns at all costs’ - POLITICO"
Post a Comment