The number of new coronavirus infections across the United States has increased dramatically recently. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said the Variant virus may become the primary source of infection in April, undoing efforts by authorities to accelerate vaccination to slow the spread of the variant virus.
Most of the viruses currently showing cases in the United States are the B.1.1.7 variant found in the United Kingdom. According to statistics, most of the record 306 new coronavirus cases reported on Feb. 28 were concentrated in three states, including 104 cases added in Florida, 85 cases added in Michigan and 41 cases added in Texas.
Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), said it is worrisome that the number of confirmed cases is stopping at 70,000 per day without slowing down, and that the spread of the variant virus could cause another outbreak.
Regarding the increase in cases due to the prevalence of variant strains, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said, “The extent of the current spread of Variant viruses makes it possible to lose all of our efforts to prevent the Epidemic.”
She said the number of confirmed diagnoses has continued to decline over the past few weeks, but last week there was a 2 percent increase from previous weeks and a 2 percent increase in seven-day deaths to nearly 2,000 per day.
Varensky called on states that have relaxed their precautions to keep fighting the epidemic and encouraged people to get vaccinated, saying “vaccines are going to be the way to get us out of this epidemic, and we have to get more people vaccinated.”
In an interview with CBS, Fauci said, “We’ve seen what happens when we don’t succeed in lifting the vaccine, we’ll beat the virus, but we haven’t succeeded.” He said, “We understand the need and the desire of the people to return to normalcy because the epidemic has improved a little bit. But we have to keep the baseline lower, especially as the variant virus spreads in California and New York, and we have to be more vigilant.”
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