US Coronavirus: This is how close the US is to a possible Covid-19 wave, an expert warns

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“Four weeks ago, the B.1.1.7 variant made up about 1 to 4% of the virus we saw in communities across the country. Now it’s 30 to 40%,” said Osterholm, the director of The Center for Research and Policy for Infectious Diseases at the University of Minnesota, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday.

“What we’ve seen in Europe: if we hit that 50% mark, you’ll see cases increase dramatically,” he said.

People gather on a beach in Miami on Saturday, March 5, 2021

Here’s what we know about the B.1.1.7 variant

While multiple variants of coronavirus are circulating in the US, experts have been particularly concerned about the dangerous potential of the highly contagious B.1.1.7 variant.

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In mid-January, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned that cases of the variant are likely to “grow rapidly in early 2021,” adding that it would likely become the predominant variant in the US by this month.

To date, the agency has reported more than 2,600 known cases of the variant in 46 states, Puerto Rico and Washington DC. Nearly a quarter of those cases take place in Florida. But the CDC has said that this likely does not represent the total number of such cases in the US, but only the cases found by analyzing positive samples using genomic sequencing.

Infectious disease specialist and epidemiologist Dr. Celine Gounder told CNN on Sunday that she was at an emergency meeting of a group of experts on Christmas Eve to discuss the variant.

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“We’ve been watching it closely ever since,” she said. “Where it has been hit in the UK and now elsewhere in Europe, it has been really catastrophic. It has increased hospital admissions and deaths and it is very difficult to control.”

New research shows that the variant in the US is 59% to 74% more transmissible than the original new coronavirus. Gounder says cases in the US are “growing exponentially.”
That is why it is crucial that the country continues to push for the curbing of Covid-19 infections. Vaccination numbers are still not high enough – and won’t be high enough in a few weeks’ time – to help quell the predicted rise, experts warned.

“This is a bit like we ran this very long marathon, and we are 100 yards from the finish line and we sit down and we give up,” Gounder said on Sunday. “We’re almost there, we just need to give ourselves a little more time to get more of the population under the vaccines.”

‘This is not just about personal choice’

But just in the first week of March, multiple governors announced they were relaxing restrictions to stop the spread of the virus.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced he would lift the statewide mask mandate and allow companies to reopen at 100% capacity starting Wednesday. Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves made one similar announcement, saying that he is abolishing provincial mask mandates and capacity limits for companies.
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On Sunday, Reeves defended his decision, saying it would be an unrealistic goal to rid the state of Covid-19 cases completely, and that the numbers on Covid-19 that officials were concerned about had all diminished.

“We look much more closely from a data point of view on hospital admissions, number of Mississippians in the ICU, number of Mississippians on fans … all those numbers have plummeted in our state in the past two months,” he told CNN.

Reeves said the state has tried to protect lives “but also to protect livelihoods.”

“We need to get our economy going so that people can get back to work, and I think that’s critical,” he said.

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And even without mask mandates, the governor said he recommends and “strongly” encourages residents to wear masks.

Dr. Ashish Jha, Dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, told ABC that the responsibility of states is to enforce mask mandates.

“This isn’t just about personal choice, right, it’s like I would drink and get behind the wheel of a car, it’s not just a personal choice that I would endanger my life, but other human lives, too, Jha said.

“When you wear a mask, you not only protect yourself, but you also protect those around you,” he added.

Less than 10% of Americans are fully vaccinated

Health officials say a more appropriate time for states to begin relaxing restrictions would be when the daily Covid-19 cases are far away – “significantly less” than 10,000, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci – and the vaccination rates are much higher.
To date, according to CDC vaccination data, more than 58.8 million Americans have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine.
About 50 people were vaccinated at a Florida location, despite not being eligible

More than 30.6 million people have received two doses, the data shows. That’s about 9.2% of the US population.

But officials are hopeful that vaccinations will be ramped up in the coming months with the help of a wider supply.

Andy Slavitt, a senior adviser to the White House’s Covid-19 response team, said on MSNBC Sunday that more than enough vaccines will be produced for every adult by the end of May. The president also said last week that the US will have enough vaccines for every adult American by the end of May, hastening the government’s previous goal by two months.

“We will have enough vaccines, I think we said for 300 million Americans,” Slavitt said on Sunday. “There are currently 250 million adults in the country, and at the moment, as we know, most of the teens are not eligible, and younger children are not eligible, so it’s more than enough for any adult.”

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Slavitt added that vaccines are now moving “very, very quickly” from factories to weapons, and that the country is becoming more and more efficient at administering the doses.

And according to Fauci, the country’s high school students could be vaccinated by the fall, while younger students will likely have to wait a little longer.

“Right now, tests are underway to determine both safety and comparable immunogenicity in high school students,” Fauci told CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “We predict that high school students will very likely be able to get vaccinated by the fall period, perhaps not the very first day, but certainly in the early fall for that fall educational period.”

CNN’s Nadia Kounang, Naomi Thomas and Artemis Moshtaghian contributed to this report.

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