In two days, a new government will be dealing with the COVID pandemic in the United States. And on the eve of becoming the director of the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Rochelle Walensky, MD, selected by the president-elect Joe Biden to lead the CDC at this crucial time, it issued a very bleak warning about the coming days of the pandemic. COVID-19 has claimed the lives of nearly 400,000 Americans, but only next month, predicts Walensky another 100,000 people could die, bringing the total number to half a million. In an interview with CBS News’s Face the Nation on Sunday, 17 January, Walensky said: “In mid-February, we expect half a million deaths in this country. This does not concern the tens of thousands of people living with an uncharacterized syndrome after they have” “I have already recovered . And we still haven’t seen the ramifications of what happened with vacation travel, with vacation collections, in terms of high rates of hospitalizations and deaths after that. I think we still have a few dark weeks ahead. “
Read on to hear more about this new voice in the fight against COVID and to learn more about what not what to do to stay safe, see The CDC warns against using these 6 face masks.
Read the original article at Better life.
The CDC’s national forecast predicts up to 30,000 new deaths in early February.
Walensky noted that we are at “almost 4,000 deaths per day, almost 400,000 deaths in total”. The latest version of the CDC weekly national set forecast, issued on January 13, projected between 16,200 and 29,600 new deaths in the week ending February 6, bringing the total number of deaths at that point to between 440,000 and 477,000 in the United States .
Although new cases are peaking and starting to fall, this means that hospitalizations and deaths are likely to increase, hence the expected increase in the death count. Scott Gottlieb, MD, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), also appeared on Face the Nation on January 17th. As he explained: “We are seeing a short-term peak in terms of the number of new daily cases. Now, unfortunately, deaths and hospitalizations will continue to grow in the next two or three weeks because they” re an indicator of delay. But we will see continuous declines likely for about four weeks, perhaps five weeks before this new variant starts to take over. “Keep reading to learn more about the new variants that cause concern and for another warning on the subject, see why Dr. Fauci has just warned you about these two” most threatening “COVID strains
The new mutations are of concern to specialists for 3 reasons.
Walensky, the former head of infectious diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital, where she worked on HIV / AIDS policy both domestically and internationally, made it clear that virus mutations are expected with COVID-19. “It’s not just the coronavirus, there are a lot of viruses and they mutate when they’re under pressure,” she said in Face the Nation.
“When we see these mutations, we worry about several things,” she explained. The main causes of concern are whether the mutations are “more transmissible”, whether they have “greater morbidity and mortality” and whether they will “run away from our treatment mechanisms or our vaccines”.
“So far, the UK vaccine appears to be more transmissible. We have no further information on whether it escapes our vaccines,” said Walensky. “We have indications that it probably won’t. But what means greater transmissibility is that there are more cases and, therefore, more deaths. There are certainly more studies examining the South African strain, the Brazilian strain and other strains from Nigeria. “
Walensky added that the growing number of new mutations proves that the United States needs to do more sequencing to determine which strains are becoming more dominant. “One of the things that this really demonstrates is our need to be vigilant and to have the resources to do surveillance, to make sure we understand which strains are here,” she said. And to find out more about where the UK strain is in the United States as of now, check out The new UK COVID strain is now in these 15 states.
She says there are 100 million doses of the COVID vaccine for the next 100 days.
“We are confident that we have enough vaccine for the 100 million doses in the next 100 days. This is what the president-elect has promised,” said Walensky. “It will be a heavy lifting, but we are able to do that. And to do that, we have to check the supply for sure. We have to check in and make sure that there are enough people being vaccinated, but not too many to overburden the system. “
Regarding any challenges to putting this vaccine supply in the hands of the public, Walensky added that “we have to make sure that there are enough vaccinators. I know that the president-elect has pledged to use the Defense Production Act to ensure that, wherever there is any bottleneck in that supply, we will, you know, resolve those bottlenecks. “And for one thing you need to stop before you get vaccinated, know that if you take these OTC drugs, you must stop before getting the vaccine.
She hopes to have younger children and high school students back in class soon.
To reopen schools quickly, Walensky said that “one of the things we want to do is make sure that we can vaccinate our educators and people in our school systems.” Walensky said the Biden government hopes to vaccinate enough teachers, obtain the necessary resources for elementary and high schools and reduce infection rates enough to be able to “[get] our K through eight children back … that is the anticipated goal. “And to find out more about the latest news that COVID is spreading, check out how bad the COVID outbreak is in your state.