Wednesday’s forecast of another 80,000 people dying this month comes as health experts rush to increase vaccinations to anticipate the most communicable variants, which they fear may increase cases again.
The best way to prevent variants from dominating the pandemic, said the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, is to prevent replication of the virus through rapid vaccination and health measures to prevent the spread.
Currently, the United States is not vaccinating at a rate fast enough to stay ahead of the variants, he said, but “we are getting better and better,” Fauci told NBC News on Wednesday.
The number of variants in the U.S. and the speed with which they are spreading can be difficult for researchers to track because of the amount of genetic sequencing it takes across the country, according to New York City health adviser Jay Varma .
“I think the safest thing to do is to plan on the assumption that there are many more cases than the variants of what we know,” said Varma.
Given the unknowns about the variants and how long it will take the United States to reach the herd immunity limit with vaccines, Dr. Ricardo Franco, from the University of Alabama’s AIDS Research Center in Birmingham, said it is not time to give in 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
Soon, two more vaccines may join 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% effectiveness against symptomatic diseases starting two weeks after the second injection. The Oxford researchers also suggested that the vaccine may reduce transmission of the virus, rather than simply reducing the severity of the disease.
“I certainly have every reason to believe in the British, but I would like to see the data in person,” NBC’s Fauci told Savannah Guthrie of the data that has not yet been reviewed by experts.
However, if it is true that it interrupts transmission, he said, “It is good news, you know, again another vaccine candidate in the mix.”
The data suggest the vaccine could reduce transmission by up to two-thirds, “which is an impressive finding if it is true,” Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet, told Becky Anderson of CNN on Wednesday.
The Lancet is currently conducting a scientific review of peer research.
Meanwhile, a Johnson & Johnson vaccine candidate has become the third to seek FDA emergency use authorization and is currently being revised.
“We can literally see in a week or more that they will end up getting the type of emergency use authorization,” Fauci told NBC News.
School districts and teachers disagree with reopening
Meanwhile, the effort to bring students back to classrooms in the midst of the pandemic has sparked lawsuits and threats of strikes.
However, the director of the CDC, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, said on Wednesday that the data is increasingly supporting the safety of returning to schools under the right conditions.
With weekly examinations of students, teachers and staff using rapid antigen tests, schools can reduce their infections by 50% in high school and 35% in elementary school, according to a new study by the Rockefeller Foundation.
But many cities are experiencing frustration, as schools or teachers express hesitation to return.
Schools in Chicago were supposed to bring students back to campus on Monday, but negotiations are underway between the district and teachers to avoid a strike.
In Minneapolis, after a weekend decision that teachers cannot be forced to return to face-to-face learning if they had already requested accommodations to work remotely, the Public School District is moving forward with plans to resume pre-K classes. up to the fifth graders on Monday. More than half of the families chose to keep their students learning remotely.
The city of San Francisco sued its own school district on Wednesday for failing to open schools.
“The indisputable scientific consensus is that schools can safely reopen for teachers, staff and students with due care, and that face-to-face teaching is not causing spikes in Covid-19 infections. We will follow science and open school doors “said the city attorney Dennis Herrera said at a virtual press conference.
Black and Hispanic people in the US vaccinated disproportionately less
Although blacks and Hispanic Americans are often affected by the coronavirus at a disproportionately higher rate, they are receiving fewer vaccinations, according to analyzes by the Kaiser Family Foundation.
More than 20 states now report vaccination data for Covid-19 by race or ethnicity, and inequalities in vaccination for Covid-19 are present in all of them, the analysis concluded.
Blacks received a smaller share of vaccines than their share of Covid-19 cases in all 23 who reported this data, and the same applies to Hispanics in all 21 states that reported this data.
In most of these states, blacks and Hispanics also received a smaller share of Covid-19 vaccines than their share of deaths, with Vermont and Missouri as exceptions.
In Vermont, the share of vaccinations among blacks was equal to the share of Covid-19 deaths among blacks, and in Vermont and Missouri, the share of vaccinations among Hispanics was greater than the share of Covid-19 deaths among Hispanics.
A CNN analysis of state vaccination data last week found that vaccine coverage is twice as high among whites, on average, than among blacks and Hispanics.
CNN’s Ben Tinker, Haley Brink, Naomi Thomas, Kristina Sgueglia, Christopher Rios, John Bonifield, Elizabeth Stuart, Dan Simon, Augie Martin, Jen Christensen and Deidre McPhillips contributed to this report.