Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s leading infectious disease specialist, warned on Sunday that the significant number of Americans traveling on vacation could mean new spikes in cases in addition to the existing increase.
“We can very well see a post-seasonal increase – towards Christmas, New Year -,” said Fauci in CNN’s “State of the Union”.
“We are really at a very critical point,” he said. “If you put more pressure on the system because of what may be a post-seasonal increase because of travel and the likely concentration of people for, you know, the warm good purposes of being together on vacation, it is very difficult for people do not do it. “
Fauci also endorsed the decision by US authorities to require negative covid-19 tests before allowing people to enter the United States from Britain, saying that the variant strain first detected in the UK that has spread to other nations is something “to be followed very carefully”.
On Fox News Sunday, Admiral Brett Giroir, government test coordinator, noted that Thanksgiving trips did not lead to an increase in cases everywhere, suggesting that many people followed the recommendations for wearing masks. and limit the size of meetings.
“It really depends on what travelers do when they get to where they are going,” said Giroir. “We know that the actual physical act of traveling on airplanes, for example, can be quite safe because of the air purification systems. What really concerns us is the mixture of different bubbles when you arrive at your destination.”
Still, the number of cases in the United States is as high as before. Total infections exceeded 19 million on Saturday, meaning that at least 1 in 17 people contracted the virus during the pandemic. And the virus has killed more than 332,000 people – 1 in 1,000 in the country.
Two of the worst days of the year for deaths were during the past week. Several states established death records on Tuesday or Wednesday, including Alabama, Wisconsin, Arizona and West Virginia, according to data from The New York Times.
And hospitalizations are reaching a pandemic peak of about 120,000, according to the COVID Tracking Project.
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In this context, millions of people in the United States have been traveling, although much less than normal.
Some 3.8 million people passed the Travel Security Administration’s travel checkpoints between Wednesday and Saturday, compared with 9.5 million on those days last year. Only a quarter of the number of people who flew the day after Christmas last year did so on Friday, and Christmas Eve travel fell by a third from 2019.
The AAA forecast said that more than 81 million Americans would travel by car during the vacation period, from Wednesday to January 3, which would be about a third less than last year.
For the time being, the United States is no longer seeing explosive overall growth, although the worsening California outbreak has canceled progress in other parts of the country. The state added more than 300,000 cases in the seven-day period that ended on Tuesday. And six southern states saw steady increases in cases last week: Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Florida and Texas.
Anomalies in holiday reports can obscure any post-Christmas spikes until the second week of January. Tests were expected to decline around Christmas and New Year, and many states said they would not release data on certain days.
Gallery: Coronavirus scenes, 12/27/2020
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NATIONS REPORT VARIANT
Meanwhile, Canada, France, Japan, Spain and Norway have found a small number of infections involving the new potentially more transmissible variant of coronavirus detected for the first time in Britain.
The United States has yet to report any cases of the British variant. But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Thursday that it would require all airline passengers arriving from Britain to have a negative coronavirus test within 72 hours of their departure. The rule will take effect today.
British officials are telling their American colleagues that it looks like the vaccines being launched will be strong enough to handle the new variant, but, Fauci said in “State of the Union”, https://www.arkansasonline.com/ news / 2020 / dec / 28 / virus-expert-fears-post-holidays-spike / “let’s do the studies ourselves.”
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The rapid spread of the variant led to the blockade of London and the south of England, caused a temporary blockade of France to the English Channel and resulted in a ban on travelers from Britain around the world. Since few countries have the level of genomic surveillance that Britain does, there is concern that the variant may have traveled the world undetected for weeks.
A recent study by British scientists found no evidence that the variant was more deadly than others, but estimated it to be 56% more contagious.
The British variant was diagnosed in seven people in Japan, the country’s health ministry said. Everyone had recently traveled to Britain or had been in contact with someone who did.
The discovery in Japan led the country to close its borders to all new inflows of non-resident foreigners. The ban will take effect at midnight today and will last until the end of January, public broadcaster NHK said.
In Spain, the variant was found in the capital region, local officials said on Saturday. Antonio Zapatero, a regional health officer, said that four cases were confirmed in Madrid, while three others were being treated as suspects. At least two of the cases involve people who have recently been to Britain and then tested positive in Madrid, as well as some of their relatives.
In France, the first case of the new variant was identified Friday, according to the country’s health ministry. Officials said the patient was a French citizen living in Britain who traveled from London to Tours, a city in central France, on December 19, the day before the British government imposed a blockade because of the variant.
Swedish officials said on Saturday that a case of the variant was detected there after a traveler visited Sormland, near Stockholm, from Britain at Christmas, Reuters reported.
Health officials in Ontario, Canada, said on Saturday they had confirmed two cases of the variant in the province. The two cases included a couple from Durham, about 145 kilometers northwest of Toronto. The couple had no history of travel, exposure or high-risk contacts, the provincial health ministry said.
And on Sunday, the Oslo Institute of Public Health reported that two travelers from Britain who entered Norway this month had the new variant, according to Reuters.
‘WINNING FORMULA’
Pascal Soriot, chief executive of pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, which is developing a coronavirus vaccine with broad expectation of approval by British authorities this week, said the researchers believe the injection will be effective against a new variant of the virus.
Soriot also told the Sunday Times that the researchers who developed his vaccine found a “winning formula”, making the jab as effective as rival candidates.
Some have expressed concern that the AstraZeneca vaccine, which is being developed with the University of Oxford, may not be as good as the one made by Pfizer which is already being distributed in the UK and other countries. The partial results suggest that the injection of AstraZeneca is about 70% effective in preventing disease caused by coronavirus infection, compared to the 95% effectiveness reported by Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech.
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“We think we have found the winning formula and how to achieve effectiveness that, after two doses, is up to everyone else,” said Soriot. “I can’t say any more because we are going to publish at some point.”
Britain’s government says its drug regulator is reviewing final data from AstraZeneca’s phase three clinical trials. The Times and others reported that the go-ahead could go until Thursday, and vaccines could begin to be launched to the UK public in the first week of January.
Asked about the effectiveness of the vaccine against the new coronavirus variant that spreads in the UK, Soriot said: “So far, we think the vaccine should remain effective. But we can’t be sure, so let’s test it.”
Information for this article was contributed by Lauren Wolfe, Andrea Kannapell, Ben Dooley, Raphael Minder, Marc Santora, Isabella Kwai and Norimitsu Onishi of The New York Times; and by Sylvia Hui and members of The Associated Press staff.