COVID update: Fauci warns that progress in the fight against coronavirus seems to have stopped

WASHINGTON – At the White House COVID response team briefing on Friday, top US health officials warned that recent progress in the decreasing number of cases appears to have stopped and that restrictions should not be relaxed until the line US base rate is much lower.

The numbers have plummeted since the beginning of January, but the average seven-day cases are still around 70,000.

This rivals last year’s summer peak and threatens to push the US in the wrong direction.

“Certainly, 70,000 are not there. Not even close,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s leading infectious disease specialist. “You need to decrease the test’s positivity while increasing the vaccine’s scale.”

Fauci said he wants to see where the numbers are going next week or later before advising people to loosen restrictions.

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, agreed.

“The latest data suggests that these declines may be stalling, potentially stabilizing and (at) a very high number,” she said. “We at CDC consider this to be a very worrying change in trajectory.”

“We can end the virus, but the virus did not end with us. We cannot be comfortable or give a false sense of security that the worst of the pandemic is over, ”she said.

Fauci says the next week or so will be critical.

“We don’t want to be people always looking at the dark side of things, but you want to be realistic,” he said. “So we have to look carefully at what happens in the next week or so with those numbers, before we start to make the understandable need to relax under certain restrictions. So just watch carefully and be prepared to react according to what really happens. ”