Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky said Tuesday (May 18) that the U.S. looks to be on its way out of a pandemic. She noted that the average number of new crown cases and deaths in the last seven days is the lowest since the start of the epidemic.
Speaking at a press briefing by the White House New Crowns response team, Werenski said the recent numbers show “we should all be cautiously optimistic.
Andy Slavitt, senior White House adviser on the new crown outbreak, added to the good news. He mentioned that case numbers have dropped in all 50 states over the past week, the first time during the outbreak.
Although vaccinations have slowed, Varensky said the U.S. continues to vaccinate 1.5 million to 2 million people a day. She said that since the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the CDC approved and recommended the Pfizer vaccine for adolescents 12 years of age and older, more than 600,000 adolescents have been vaccinated.
Varensky also cited the fact that 60 percent of the nation’s people 18 and older have received at least one dose of the vaccine as a good sign that the United States will easily reach the goal set by President Joe Biden of having 70 percent of the adult population receive at least one dose of the vaccine by July 4.
At the same press briefing, White House senior medical adviser Anthony Fauci tried to reassure Americans about the effectiveness of the new crown vaccine. He presented recent studies that show existing U.S. vaccines are proving to protect against virus variants, including the B.1.6.7 strain originally found in India.
The CDC is developing guidelines for when U.S. school-age children can return to school this year or when they can attend summer camps in the coming months, Walenski said. Those guidelines will be based on the number of children who will be vaccinated in the coming months, so they are still in the process of being developed, she said.
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