The Biden administration is again sounding the alarm on the “rising coronavirus cases,” urging Americans currently living in areas with elevated infection rates to get back to Covid protocols, such as mask wearing, and vaccinating and boosting once “eligible.”
As reported by The Washington Post on Wednesday, the timing of the rising infection rate is unfortunate, since Americans are getting ready to celebrate Memorial Day next weekend, which could facilitate a further rise in cases, noting, “The increase in new infections — nearing 100,000 a day — comes as the nation heads into Memorial Day weekend with its large gatherings and travel.”
But that number that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) calculated, said officials including CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, is inaccurate and “is almost certainly an undercount.” That is because people often use at-home tests, the results of which are often not reported to health officials.
According to the report, Walensky strongly encouraged those living in communities with “medium” and “high” “Covid-19 Community Levels” to resume wearing masks in indoor public spaces and take other steps to protect themselves.
“As we’re currently seeing a steady rise of cases in parts of the country, we encourage everyone to use the menu of tools we have today to prevent further infection and severe disease, including wearing a mask, getting tested, accessing treatments early if infected and getting vaccinated or boosted,” Walensky said, per the Post.
The CDC announced major changes to the metric for evaluating Covid community levels. After two years of the pandemic, the agency shifted from simply counting Covid cases to factoring in hospital beds being used, hospital admissions, and the total number of new Covid cases in an area. As a result, more than 90 percent of the U.S. population found themselves living in areas with low or medium Covid community level. That metric was used to justify easing mask recommendations.
Walensky admitted before updating the guidance that her agency simply wanted to “give people a break” from wearing masks. It appears that this break might be over.
As seen from the most recent update, nearly a quarter of Americans live in counties with “medium” (14.98 percent) or “high” (9.21 percent) Covid community rates. The rest, or nearly 76 percent of Americans, are still in the “green” zone, which shrank by almost six percent compared to the previous week.
Walensky broke those numbers down. Per the report,
The seven-day average of new infections has climbed to about 94,000 per day, an increase of 26 percent over the previous week and a threefold increase over the past month. Hospitalizations are also beginning to rise, she said, with admissions increasing about 19 percent over the previous week, to about 3,000 per day.
According to the CDC recommendations, folks in “high”-risk zones should wear a mask in indoor public settings, “regardless of vaccination status or individual risk (including in K-12 schools and other community settings).”
In “medium”-risk zones, the CDC recommends immunocompromised Americans consult with their doctors on “additional precautions,” such as wearing masks.
It goes without saying that all “eligible” Americans are encouraged to get vaccinated and take an extra dose of the vaccine, in some cases, up to three. That now includes children aged five to 11, since the CDC now recommends healthy children of that age to receive a third (or fourth, if one is immunocompromised) dose after five months of their primary series.
Besides Walensky, officials quoted by the Post included Ashish Jha, White House coronavirus coordinator, and Anthony Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical advisor. All of them signaled that while the current situation was “far less dire than the winter omicron-variant surge,” if they don’t receive “billions” of funding from Congress, the country will get overwhelmed with new infections, which will average one million a day come fall and winter.
How could that happen in a country with 66.5 percent of the population being “fully vaccinated,” and more than half being immune as a result of infection, according to the CDC? Notably, according to the CDC, by February 2022, 75 percent of children under the age of 18 have contracted Covid and developed natural immunity, which is equal or superior to “vaccine immunity.”
The answer is simple. Omicron subvariants that “have shown a remarkable ability to escape immunity” are becoming dominant in America. That means that the vaccines don’t protect people enough to prevent infection, as was obvious even to the CDC a year ago, when the vaccinated were becoming infected with the Delta strain that replaced previous strains.
To resolve the issue, the Biden administration wants to purchase Omicron-specific boosters from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, which are already being produced. As suggested by the report, the absence of any data, let alone on the long-term side effects and efficacy of the shots, does not seem to bother the officials tasked with protecting public health:
But it remains unclear whether those shots will be more effective than existing vaccines. Even so, officials said the administration will struggle to buy enough doses of the new vaccines without money from Congress.
Back in early March, the administration requested $22.5 billion ($5 billion of which would go to other countries) in “immediate” Covid aid that would be used to purchase new vaccines, treatments, and testing.
In early April, the Senate worked out a bipartisan $10 billion deal, but backlash over the Biden administration’s decision to drop the pandemic-related Title 42 expulsion policy put passage of the legislation on hold, which is still stalled at the Senate.
