“No excuses – we’re not where we want to be, but we hope to get a little momentum and get back to where we want to be in terms of putting you in people’s arms,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, he said on Sunday at NBC’s Meet The Press.
But the pace is accelerating, with about 1.5 million doses administered in 72 hours, said Fauci. This means that the speed of vaccinations is actually better than the numbers at first suggest, he added.
Moncef Slaoui, chief adviser to Operation Warp Speed, told Margaret Brennan of CBS on Sunday that 17.5 million doses were shipped and that the US federal government is optimistic that they will be administered more quickly.
With people traveling in many countries over the holidays, it will be important to “be patient and stay the course” when it comes to preventing spread, said Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO technical leader for coronavirus response, to CNN’s senior medical correspondent, Elizabeth Cohen.
“We will have a difficult start in 2021,” said Van Kerkhove.
Covid-19 appears in several states
The increase in cases in many states has resulted in hospitals struggling to meet the demand for treatment of patients with coronavirus.
In Los Angeles County, a person contracts the virus every six seconds, Mayor Eric Garcetti told CBS’s Face the Nation program, attributing the spread to population density and household spread.
More than 45,000 new cases were reported in California on Sunday, when the state’s hospitalization rate reached its highest level since the pandemic began, with 21,510 people currently being treated in hospitals, the state health department panel shows.
In Arizona, the state reported its highest daily total of cases on Sunday, at over 17,000. There are 1,081 patients currently in the ICU with Covid-19, while there are 4,557 hospitalized patients.
South Carolina reported a positivity rate for coronavirus of 29.6% on Sunday, as four of the state’s 46 counties reported that their hospitals were at 100% capacity, according to the Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control southern.
“There is no escaping the numbers,” Fauci told ABC. “It is something that we absolutely have to grab and embrace and reduce this inflection through a very intense adherence to public health measures, uniformly across the country, without exceptions.”
‘What we do now is important’, says US Surgeon General
There is hope that the United States and other countries with coronavirus outbreaks could return to something similar to normal in the summer or fall, said Kerkhove.
But measures such as testing, isolation, contact tracking and quarantine have already brought this sense of normality to other countries, she said.
“We have already seen countries drop this virus, without vaccination,” she said. “We have the tools available now to really control this virus.”
The surgeon general of the United States, Dr. Jerome Adams, urged Americans, especially those who gathered during the holidays, to self-quarantine, get tested, wear a mask, wash their hands and take care of the distance.
“Projections are very scary, but they are projections, and what we do now matters,” Adams told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “I want people to understand that if we overcome this sudden increase, things will start to improve, but it depends on the actions that we all take now.”
Adam’s wife Lacey was admitted to the hospital because of complications from her cancer treatment. He said he was unable to see her because of Covid-19.
“I want people to understand that if you don’t take precautions against Covid because you don’t feel at risk, it can impact you, your family and your community in many other ways,” he said. “I, as Surgeon General of the United States, had to leave my wife at the front door and I couldn’t see her enter the hospital, I couldn’t visit her, I didn’t know if she was going to have a hospital bed because of all Covid’s precautions. “
CNN’s Naomi Thomas, Virginia Langmaid, Kay Jones, Gregory Lemos and Elizabeth Cohen contributed to this report.