Dr. Peter Hotez, co-director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children’s Hospital, says the US is “going to have a tough ride” as new Covid variants spread across the country.
“Because they are more transmissible, it means more Americans will get infected, so even though we have a slight decrease in the number of new cases … the expectation now, it will increase again because of these new variants,” Hotez said in a statement. Thursday night interview on “The News with Shepard Smith.” “More people will become infected, overwhelm hospital systems again, and possibly the death rate will rise, both from a combination of more new cases in general and slightly higher mortality rates just from the variant just now. by the nature of the variant. “
Health officials in South Carolina have confirmed two cases of the dangerous, highly communicable South African tribe of Covid. The officials said the cases appear to be unrelated and unrelated to recent travel. Dr. Zeke Emanuel, a member of President Joe Biden’s Covid Advisory Board, said that’s why the South African species is so concerning.
“This is concerning because these two individuals have no proof of travel, and so it means that the South African variant, which is even more concerning than even the UK variant, is going over and into the community,” said Emanuel.
Hotez told host Shep Smith that the new strains are even more problematic because “we haven’t searched.”
“We underperform so deeply in genomic sequencing, and that’s how we’re picking up these UK, South African and Brazilian variants, so we know they’re in South Carolina, but they could be elsewhere,” the company said. Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned that the British variety, also known as B117, could be dominant in the US by the spring. Hotez said the key to protecting the population was getting people vaccinated faster.
“The bottom line is that we will have to find a way to vaccinate the American people faster than current forecasts,” Hotez said. “First to reduce hospitalization and mortality, but also to get ahead of these variants. If we can vaccinate three-quarters of the US population, we may be able to interrupt transmission and prevent some of these new variants from becoming dominant.”