White House Says, ‘US On Path Out Of The Pandemic;’ Warns People To Have Cautious Optimism
The White House COVID-19 Response Team has announced that the United States is on a path out of the coronavirus pandemic, but warned its people to be cautiously optimistic.
“Cases have continued to decrease and have not been this low since spring of last year. Hospital admissions are down, deaths are down, and we are vaccinating between 1.5 million and 2 million people per day,” CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said at a routine press briefing by White House COVID-19 Response Team and Public Health Officials.
The seven-day average of hospital admissions is 3,500, a positive sign with another back-to-back decrease of nearly 18 percent from the prior seven-day period.
Seven-day average of daily deaths has declined to a new low of 546 per day. The last time a seven-day average was this low was in March 2020.
The United States reported 27506 coronavirus cases on Tuesday, taking the national total to 33,774,945, as per the latest data from Johns Hopkins University.
With 733 deaths in the same period, the total number of COVID fatalities rose to 601,330.
A total of 27,253,327 people have so far recovered from coronavirus infection in the country.
White House Senior Advisor for COVID Response Andy Slavitt said there is light at the end of the tunnel, and that the country is “winning the war on the virus”.
Vaccines have led to a dramatic decline in cases, hospitalizations and deaths. For the first time since the pandemic began, COVID cases are down in all 50 states.
He added that the Biden administration has secured enough vaccine supply for all eligible Americans. This week, more than 27 million doses will be rolled out in the country.
Dr. Walensky said that while cases, hospitalizations and deaths are down, COVID patients now tend to be younger. More than 1 in 3 people who are being hospitalized due to COVID are younger than 50.
According to the CDC, more than 3 million children under 17 have contracted the disease in the U.S. “And even though it’s rare for kids to get severely ill from COVID-19, it can happen”, she told reporters.
She said that after FDA authorized and CDC recommended use of the Pfizer vaccine for adolescents, more than 600,000 children in the 12-15 age group were vaccinated in less than one week. In total, more than 4.1 million adolescents aged 12 to 17 have been vaccinated so far.
Chief Medical Advisor to the President Dr. Anthony Fauci said that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine has neutralized coronavirus variants diagnosed in New York and California. “The variant that’s dominant in this country, including the E484k variant, remains susceptible to neutralizing antibodies,” according to him.
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