Fauci predicts that the US will gain control over the pandemic next fall

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The leading infectious disease expert in the United States, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said on Wednesday that he predicts that America will achieve sufficient collective COVID-19 immunity through vaccinations to restore “some appearance of normality” by the fall of 2021, despite the first setbacks in vaccine implantation.

Fauci made his comments during an online pandemic discussion with California Governor Gavin Newsom, who announced at the outset that a more infectious variant of coronavirus originally found in Britain was detected in his state, the day after the first known case in the USA has been documented in Colorado.

Newsom said that coronavirus variant B.1.1.7 was confirmed earlier in the day in a Southern California patient. He did not provide further details. But the California Department of Public Health said in a statement later that the person, a San Diego County patient, has no known travel history, suggesting that the variant is spreading through the community.

Fauci said he was “not surprised”, adding that additional cases of the variant are likely to arise across the country and that the mutant nature of these viruses is normal.

“It seems that this particular mutation makes the virus better at transmitting from one person to another,” he said. However, individuals infected with previous forms of SARS-CoV-2 “do not appear to be reinfected as a result”, meaning that any immunity already acquired “is protective against this specific strain,” added Fauci.

He also emphasized that the so-called UK variant is not considered more serious in the disease it causes, and that the newly approved COVID-19 vaccines will be just as effective against it as against known forms of the virus.

The same is believed to be true for a second new variant, also more infectious and reported for the first time in South Africa, according to the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Still, the emergence of a more highly transmissible variant could make rapid implementation of immunizations even more critical.

President-elect Joe Biden warned on Tuesday that it could take years to inoculate most Americans, given an initial vaccine distribution rate that fell short of the Trump administration’s promises. He asked Congress to approve more funding for the venture.

‘LET’S TAKE’

Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on Wednesday that he was confident that the initial failures in the distribution of the vaccine will be overcome.

“As we move into January, the feeling is that we are going to gain momentum in order to catch up,” he told Newsom, saying he expects immunizations to become widely available to the general public on demand by April.

Assuming that the extensive vaccination campaign progresses as it should until May, June and July, “When we get to the beginning of autumn, we will have herd immunity good enough to be able to really return to some strong appearance of normalcy – schools, theaters, sporting events, restaurants, ”said Fauci.

However, the prospect of fighting a more contagious form of the virus comes at a time when the pandemic spread and went out of control in much of the United States for weeks. California, the most populous state with 40 million inhabitants, has become the latest point of conflict, as hospitals in and around Los Angeles report crowded intensive care units.

Medical experts attribute the worsening pandemic in recent weeks to the arrival of a colder climate and the failure of many Americans to heed public health warnings to avoid social gatherings and unnecessary travel during the holiday season.

The result has been an alarming increase in infections and hospitalizations that have burdened health systems to their limits and an increasing number of deaths in the United States, exceeding 338,000 lives lost across the country to date.

In addition to changing daily social life in America, the pandemic has stifled the economy, leaving millions of workers stranded in numbers never seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The first American case of the United Kingdom variant was announced by Colorado Governor Jared Polis on Tuesday. At a news conference on Wednesday, Polis described the infected patient as a National Guard soldier in his 20s who had been assigned to help deal with a COVID outbreak at a nearby health facility in Simla, Colorado of the Denver metropolitan area.

The patient, isolating himself and recovering at home, has no recent travel history, which Dr. Henry Walke, incident manager for the CDC’s COVID response, said was a sign of person-to-person transmission of the variant in the United States United.

The director of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment told reporters that a second member of the National Guard may also have contracted the UK variant, although final laboratory confirmation is still pending.

The new variant has been detected in several European countries, in addition to Canada, Australia, India, South Korea and Japan, among others.

The US government started on Monday to require that all airline passengers arriving from Britain – including US citizens – test negative for COVID-19 within 72 hours of departure.

The government may expand coronavirus testing requirements for international travelers outside Britain as early as next week, informed sources told Reuters on Wednesday.