Joe Biden’s new administration faces a monumental task of containing the deadliest wave of the Covid-19 pandemic so far in a race against time before a more contagious coronavirus variant threatens America’s already depleted health resources.
The Biden government has only a few weeks to speed up the vaccine’s deployment and convince more Americans to wear masks, wash their hands and maintain social distance. And it must be done in the midst of a difficult transition, critical supply shortages, new widespread infections, shaken public confidence and a vaccine launch that “has been a terrible failure so far”.
“Let me be very clear, things will continue to get worse before they get better,” said Biden, at a Covid-19 meeting on Thursday afternoon. “The memorial we held last night,” to mark 400,000 American deaths, “will not be our last. The death toll is likely to reach 500,000 next month. “
More than 408,000 Americans have so far died of Covid-19 since the pandemic began, and more than 24 million infected: by far the worst figures in the world. To date, 16.5 million people in the U.S. have been vaccinated, according to federal health officials.
At the same time, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued severe warnings about a new, more infectious variant of Covid-19, called B117. The variant has already forced England to block for weeks.
Several scenarios can happen. In one model, Covid-19 infections decreased in March, only to increase again in late April and early May due to B117 infections. This model assumed that there was no broad vaccination in the community. In another model, B117 still outperforms current strains, but decreases along with current dominant strains. The drop would occur in an environment of globally reduced transmission, because people maintain social distance and vaccines are distributed to around 1 million per day.
This end point can be reached, said CDC modelers, but only if people control the spread of Covid-19 and the absorption of the vaccine is high. Biden has repeatedly promised to vaccinate 100 million Americans in 100 days, which would roughly correspond to the CDC model.
“We need to ask ordinary Americans to do their part,” said Jeff Zients, response director for Covid-19 at the White House. “Defeating the virus requires a coordinated national effort.”
At worst, hospitals that are already overburdened would be under more pressure, social distance would need to be stricter and more extensive, and more people would need to be vaccinated to make a difference. This scenario is more similar to the blockade in England, which occurred when the cases peaked in early January.
In addition, although the B117 is the only variant known to be more contagious currently in circulation, it is not the only variant with which we should be concerned. The strains identified in South Africa and Brazil also have the potential to be more transmissible, said the CDC researchers.
Faced with these new variants, Biden and his government spent the first night and all day in the infrastructure of office buildings to respond to the crisis.
“The question that he wakes up to every day is to keep the pandemic in check,” said Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, at the first press conference on Wednesday night. “The problem with which he goes to bed every night is how to keep the pandemic in check.”
Biden signed a flurry of executive orders to try to control the situation, including the creation of new federal vaccination sites, using the Defense Production Act to increase much-needed supplies, requiring the use of masks on federal properties and several other actions.
Zients acknowledged on Thursday that the Trump administration’s vaccine launch plan was, “much worse than we could have imagined,” reported the New York Times.
The adhesion of America’s state governments is also important for the distribution of vaccines quickly and equitably. Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, who was closely linked to Donald Trump, gave a news conference on Wednesday to tell Biden not to bother going to his state.
“I saw some of those things that Biden is launching, that he is going to create these Fema camps. I can say that this is not necessary in Florida, ”said DeSantis, reported the Tampa Bay Times. “We just need more vaccine. Just give us more vaccine. “
In addition, the urgency of vaccinating people has led some public health officials to shy away from documenting that vaccine recipients are members of priority groups, such as the elderly or essential workers.
In Mississippi, the state’s chief health officer, Dr. Thomas Dobbs, said that requiring documentation is not something the state “will do” because he did not want to raise barriers to vaccination. He added: “We are going to get [the] vaccine out of where we can, as much as we can, ”he said on Thursday. “It will be a little patchy, and that’s the way it is.”