Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, once again warned on Thursday of satisfaction in the fight against COVID-19, expressing concern about the “disturbingly high” level of new daily infections in the United States. .
Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a top medical adviser to President Joe Biden, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper how coronavirus deaths and hospitalizations are currently falling.
“But the number that’s annoying, Anderson, is the number of cases every day,” he said. “When we had the big peak that we discussed so many times, which increased to two to three or more hundreds of thousands of cases a day, then it decreased. But now he is being paid at a disturbingly high level. ”
The new daily infection rate is currently around 60,000.
“When you’re at that level, there’s a risk of getting an increase in blood pressure,” Fauci warned. “So, as we look at it now, it’s almost a race between vaccinating people and this growth that seems to want to grow and do what’s happening, for example, in Europe, where they have some surges now that are really quite of alarming. ”
Between three and four million people now receive COVID-19 shots in the United States every day, Fauci said, with more than a third of the population receiving at least the first dose.
“So if we could, as I’ve said so many times, stay there longer to get more and more people vaccinated every day to the point where we have enough vaccinated people that the risk of that increase will be it diminished a lot “, said Fauci.
Now it was a case of eliminating vaccines and “not withdrawing public health measures,” he added. “It is not the time, as I have said so many times, to declare victory premature. There we still have a considerable risk that we must eliminate. ”
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