In less than a year, Covid-19 killed nearly 400,000 Americans.
And in the next month alone, another 100,000 lives could be lost to the disease, said the new director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“By mid-February, we expect half a million deaths in this country,” Dr. Rochelle Walensky told CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday.
“That’s not telling the tens of thousands of people living with an uncharacterized syndrome after they recover,” said Walensky, who was head of infectious diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital before President-elect Joe Biden elected her leader. CDC.
Some people who have had Covid-19 have had symptoms for months after testing positive.
“And we still haven’t seen the ramifications of what happened from the holiday trip, from the holiday gathering, in terms of high hospitalization rates and deaths after that,” Walensky said.
“I think we have a few dark weeks ahead.”
100 million doses in 100 days: Walensky said on Sunday that the Biden administration would address “bottlenecks” in the distribution of the Covid-19 vaccine and meet its goal of delivering 100 million doses in 100 days.
“I think there are blockages in different parts of the whole system,” Walensky told Face the Nation.
“Different states have different challenges – how many are launched for each state, whether these states have adequate staff, whether these states receive vaccine in pharmacies,” she said. Our job is to make sure that, with the full support of the federal government, we address all of these blockages wherever we are, so that we can get the vaccine into people’s arms.
President-elect Joe Biden says his goal is to distribute 100 million doses of vaccine in the first 100 days of his term.
“We have looked closely and we are confident that we have enough vaccines for the 100 million doses over the next 100 days,” Walensky said. “It will be a difficult lift, but we have it in us to do it.”
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