Health officials cautioning governors
“Normal” may still be ways off as new variants emerge
The federal government warned impatient governors against relaxing pandemic control measures Friday, saying that a recent steep drop in U.S. coronavirus cases and deaths “may be stalling” and “potentially leveling off at still a very high number” — a worrisome development that comes as more cases of concerning new variants have been found and could suggest that a return to normalcy is not yet quite as near as many Americans had hoped.
“Things are tenuous,” Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention, said at a White House briefing on the pandemic. “Now is not the time to relax restrictions.”
Her warning was bolstered by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top epidemiologist, as the Biden administration scrambled to stay ahead of any new wave. President Joe Biden himself flew to Houston to showcase the government’s latest mass vaccine site.
According to a New York Times database, virus cases across the United States appear to be leveling off from the steep decline that began in January, with figures comparable to those reported in late October. Cases have slightly increased week over week in recent days, although severe weather limited testing and reporting in Texas and other states the previous week, and not all states reported complete data on the Presidents Day holiday. The seven-day average of new cases was 77,800 as of Thursday.
While deaths tend to fluctuate more than cases and hospital admissions, Walensky said at the briefing Friday, the most recent seven-day average is slightly higher than the average earlier in the week. The seven-day average of newly reported deaths was 2,165, as of Thursday.
“We at CDC consider this a very concerning shift in the trajectory,” she said, adding, “I want to be clear: Cases, hospital admissions and deaths — all remain very high, and the recent shift in the pandemic must be taken extremely seriously.”
Walensky said some of the rise may be attributable to new variants of the coronavirus that spread more efficiently and quickly.
“I know people are tired; they want to get back to life, to normal,” she said. “But we’re not there yet.”
Fauci echoed Walensky’s warnings that more rollbacks at state or local levels would be unwise, noting that case levels remained at a “very precarious position.”
“We don’t want to be people always looking at the dark side of things, but you want to be realistic,” he said.