(CNN) – As the United States prepares to hit a devastating new milestone – half a million deaths from Covid-19 – officials say the country is also nearing the end of its brutal battle against the virus.
Maryland Governor Larry Hogan announced that Sunday’s hospital admissions for Covid-19 had fallen below 1,000 for the first time since Nov. 16, and are now down more than half since their peak in January.
“Every day we are getting one step closer to eradicating and eradicating this pandemic,” Hogan said in a statement. “But we must remain vigilant and continue to do the things that protect us, our families and our communities.”
Kentucky governor Andy Beshear said on Sunday that the state saw COVID-19 cases dwindling for the sixth straight week. In a video message on Twitter, he said there is a “bright light for us” with the help of vaccines.
But Americans shouldn’t relax just yet, experts have repeatedly warned.
“I am hopeful about where we are,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, Dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, told CNN on Sunday. “Now we have a few obstacles in the way.”
Of the most dangerous pits, nearly 1,700 cases of covid-19 variants first discovered in the United Kingdom, South Africa and Brazil have been reported in the United States, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows (CDC, for the acronym in English). The agency has said it likely does not represent the total number of variants nationwide, but only the cases found by testing positive samples for COVID-19.
The vast majority of those cases involve the highly contagious B.1,1.7 variant first discovered in the UK. Experts at the University of Washington Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) said over the weekend that while that variant likely accounts for less than 20% of current infections in the United States, that number is likely to skyrocket to 80% in the end of April.
An emergency medical worker will conduct a COVID-19 test in Palm Springs, California on February 17, 2021.
“This is not the time to lower your guard”
With variants threatening a fresh increase in COVID-19 cases and vaccination rates still too low to have a significant impact on the course of the pandemic, the course of the coming months will largely depend on how Americans, according to the IHME team.
“Controlling the epidemic over the next four months depends fundamentally on increasing the vaccination rate, trying to increase the percentage of adults willing to be vaccinated above three-quarters, and strongly encouraging the use of masks and avoidance. of situations where transmission is likely to go out to dinner, to bars or meetings in confined spaces with people outside the home, ”the team wrote in a briefing.
The American Medical Association, the American Hospital Association, and the American Nurses Association also urged continued vigilance against the virus.
With the new and more contagious variants of the virus circulating in the United States, now is not the time to lower our guard and reduce the measures we know will work to prevent more illness and death: wearing face masks, physical renunciation and hand washing they said in a joint statement.
Although vaccination has already begun in the United States, masks will continue to play a vital role in slowing the spread of the virus and thereby reducing the chance of further mutations. Scientific evidence that masks work to prevent viral transmission has been evident for nearly a year, one expert noted.
“The evidence in March or April was quite compelling that the uniform use of masks would reduce the transmission of this disease,” said Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, during an interview Sunday on Axios on HBO.
“A mask is nothing more than a life-saving medical device and yet it has been categorized in many other ways that were not factual, scientific and downright dangerous,” he added. “And I think it can be said that tens of thousands of people have died as a result.”
Fauci: After the weather troubles, America will catch up with vaccines this week
The United States now also has an incredibly powerful tool against the virus: vaccines.
To date, more than 43.6 million Americans have received at least their first dose of a vaccine, data from the CDC shows, while about 18.8 million have received both doses.
That means about 5.7% of the US population is fully vaccinated, far from the kind of percentage the country would need to get close to herd immunity.
Some states are still struggling with supply shortages, vaccine equality issues and, after last week, delays caused by severe winter storms.
But Fauci predicted on Sunday that the United States will make up for those delays mid-week.
“Obviously, it’s a setback because I’d like to see the steady stream of vaccines reach people’s poor, but we can catch up pretty well,” he told NBC.
“It’s a temporary setback, and if you just, you know, put your foot on the accelerator and really push, we’re going to get where we need to be by mid-week,” he said.
To speed up vaccines, some experts have suggested that the United States consider delaying second doses of the vaccine so that people get more first doses.
Both vaccines in the US market, developed by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, require two doses, with the second to be administered 21 days and 28 days after the first, respectively.
Fauci told CNN on Sunday that the United States is currently sticking to the vaccination schedule supported by data from clinical trials.
“Science directly indicates that we are going ahead with what we know … about the clinical trial,” he said.
CNN’s Keith Allen, Jessica Firger, Naomi Thomas, Michael Nedelman and Paul Vercammen contributed to this report.