A hospital in Southern California is facing the possibility of rationing the limited number of ICU beds and treatment equipment due to the increase in cases, which means that healthcare professionals may have to make decisions about who receives treatment and who does not, infectious disease specialist Dr. Kimberly Shriner told CNN on Sunday.
Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena is preparing for “final screening” if cases continue to increase in the coming weeks, said Shriner.
And with the waves of vacation travel, health experts hope that cases will only increase. More than 1.1 million people were screened at airports on Saturday, according to the TSA. More than 616,000 were aired on Christmas Day alone and hundreds of thousands traveled in the days leading up to the holiday.
Dr. Anthony Fauci described the potential impacts of the holiday season as a “wave upon wave”.
“If you look at the slope, the slope of the cases that we experience when we enter late autumn and early winter, it is really very worrying,” said Fauci.
“As we get into the next few weeks,” he added, “it could really get worse.”
Complexity at each stage of vaccine distribution
Nearly 2 million doses of the Covid-19 vaccine have been administered in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and more than 9.5 million doses have been distributed.
Asked about the apparent slow distribution of vaccines, Fauci told CNN on Sunday that large, comprehensive vaccine programs with a new vaccine start slowly before gaining momentum.
“I am quite confident that as we gain more and more momentum, as we transition from December to January and after February to March, I believe that we will achieve the projection,” he said.
Dr. Esther Choo, professor of emergency medicine at Oregon Health & Science University, explained that the distribution of the vaccine is “just a very complicated thing”.
“At each stage, there is complexity and the possibility of delay, whether in individual state planning, allocation, training, vaccine supply, storage … there are many factors at this stage,” said Choo.
“We need to be prepared for the fact that it will be a slow implementation in many places and will not change our behavior or necessarily the path of the pandemic in this country in the short term,” said Choo.
With vaccines likely not widely available until the summer, several experts have warned Americans not to let their guard down when vaccines start and continue wearing masks, social distance, avoiding crowds and meetings and washing their hands regularly.
Moving beacons for collective immunity
For vaccines to really consolidate and achieve collective immunity against the virus, 70 to 85% of the population would need to obtain immunity to it, Fauci said on Sunday.
Fauci acknowledged that the statement was moving the goal posts, which he had previously set at 70 to 75%.
“We have to realize that we have to be humble and understand what we don’t know,” he said. “These are pure estimates and the calculations I made, 70 to 75%, are an interval.”
“The variation will be somewhere between 70 and 85%,” said Fauci, adding that the reason he started saying 70 to 75% and then bought up to 85%, which he said is not a big leap, “was really based on pure measles calculations and extrapolations. ”
The measles vaccine is about 98% effective, said Fauci, and when less than 90% of the population is vaccinated against measles, there is an advance against collective immunity and people start to become infected.
“So, I did a calculation that Covid-19, SARS-CoV-2, is not as transmissible as measles, measles is the most communicable infection you can imagine,” he said. “So, I imagine you would need something a little less than 90%, that’s when I reached 85.”
‘We believe the vaccine will be effective against the variant’
While there is a risk that a variant of the coronavirus will reach the United States from the UK, an American official said that Americans can still protect themselves with the same mitigation measures.
“We believe the vaccine will be effective against this variant,” US Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services, Admiral Brett Giroir, told Fox News on Sunday.
Giorir said the United States had an “extra layer” of protection from the CDC’s announcement last week of new test requirements for travelers arriving from the UK, which will take effect on Monday.
Passengers must have a PCR or negative antigen test within 72 hours of boarding a flight from the UK to the USA, along with documentation of their laboratory results. Airlines will be required to confirm the test before the flight.
“I think we will be very safe with that, as we have once again launched vaccines that will be highly effective against all the strains out there,” Giroir told Fox.
Although Fauci said it could be argued that the decision should have been made earlier, he called the test requirement “prudent”.
CNN’s Christina Maxouris, Hollie Silverman, Naomi Thomas, Virginia Langmaid and Pete Muntean contributed to this report.