As the exhausted American populace starts moving on with their lives, Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. immunologist White House chief medical adviser, has once again run back up to start spouting warnings that COVID-19 restrictions are coming back and are just on the horizon.
“I don’t want to use the word ‘lockdowns.’ That has a charged element to it. But, I believe that we must keep our eye on the pattern of what we’re seeing with infections,” he claimed as part of an interview on “Sunday Morning,” from BBC.
“Having said that, we need to be prepared for the possibility that we would have another variant that would come along,” stated Fauci. “And then, if things change and we do get a variant that does give us an uptick in cases and hospitalization, we should be prepared and flexible enough to pivot toward going back – at least temporarily – to a more rigid type of restrictions, such as requiring masks indoor.”
Despite this, the issues still seem to be on the way out. As of this past Tuesday, the U.S. reported a total of 42,967 new cases and 985 deaths, as stated in data from the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. This may seem high, but when compared to January we are on the way down from well over 60,000 reported deaths from the virus.
Fauci issued the warning that there are exactly the “same conditions” inside the U.S. that are resulting in massively surging cases in Europe.
“It’s the greater transmissibility of the BA.2, it’s the relaxation of restriction, particularly in the context of indoor masking in congregate settings, and also the fact that immunity, due to both vaccination as well as people who have been previously infected, tends to wane with SARS-CoV-2 – particularly with Omicron,” he claimed.
The vastly more contagious Omicron sub-variant, BA.2, is still speeding its way across the U.S., now being held accountable for well over a third of all COVID-19 infections, as seen in data put forth just last week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Quite a few studies have discovered that BA.2 is far, far more transmissible than its predecessor, BA.1, but even this information has not sparked any concern among the scientific community.
“In early 2022, BA.2 was growing more common in a number of countries,” reported a story from The New York Times. “By February, it had become dominant worldwide, driving down the once-dominant BA.1. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that BA.2 jumped to 11% in early March from 1% in early February. It could soon become dominant in this country as well.”
“But that does not mean that Americans are riding a new BA.2 wave that is infecting a lot of new people. As BA.2 became more common in the United States, the total number of new cases fell by about 95%. Worldwide, the number of daily new cases had fallen to half of what they were at their peak in late January,” claimed The Times.
All the while, just over half of the American populace has stated that they have contracted the virus, as stated in a recent poll from Monmouth University.