Health officials warn against easing restrictions
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.”
As cases had declined, some governors have begun to relax pandemic restrictions. States with Republican governors appeared to be more eager to make rollbacks, although New York, which has a Democrat as governor, has also been easing restrictions on a variety of activities.