Wednesday’s forecast of another 80,000 people dying over this month comes as health experts race to ramp up vaccinations to get ahead of the more transmissible variants, which they fear could send cases surging once again.
The best way to prevent variants from dominating the pandemic, said director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony Fauci, is to prevent the replication of the virus through quick vaccination and health measures to prevent spread.
Currently, the US is not vaccinating at a rate fast enough to get ahead of the variants, he said, but “we’re getting better and better,” Fauci told NBC News on Wednesday.
The number of variants in the US and how quickly they are spreading can be difficult for researchers to trace because of the amount of genetic sequencing it takes throughout the country, according to New York City’s health adviser Jay Varma.
“I think the safest thing to do is for us to plan on the assumption that there are a lot more cases than the variants than we know about,” Varma said.
Given the unknowns about the variants and the length of time it will take to get the US at a herd immunity threshold with vaccines, Dr. Ricardo Franco of the Center for AIDS Research at the University Alabama at Birmingham said it is not the time to give up on masks.
“This game is at halftime,” said Franco. “We need to keep pushing and not give the virus a chance to play well in the second half.”
New vaccines offer hope
Two more vaccines could soon be joining the fight against the virus.
In the preprint posted Tuesday by researchers at the University of Oxford, the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine showed 66.7% efficacy against symptomatic disease starting two weeks after the second shot. Oxford researchers also suggested the vaccine may reduce transmission of the virus, rather than simply reducing the severity of disease.
“I certainly have every reason to believe the Brits, but I’d like to see the data myself,” Fauci told NBC’s Savannah…
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