The US government’s chief medical adviser Dr Anthony Fauci warned on Sunday that time was running short to prevent a “dangerous” new surge of Covid-19 infections from overwhelming the upcoming holiday season.

Coronavirus cases across the US are rising again for the first time in weeks, and approaching 100,000 a day. Experts fear that this week’s Thanksgiving holiday, for which tens of millions of Americans will travel for indoor celebrations with family and friends, will fuel a further surge.

“We still have about 60 million people in this country who are eligible to be vaccinated who have not been, and that results in the dynamic of virus in the community that not only is dangerous and makes people who are unvaccinated vulnerable, but it also spills over into the vaccinated people,” Fauci said on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday.

“We have a lot of virus circulating around. You can’t walk away from the data, and the data show that the cases are starting to go up, which is not unexpected when you get into a winter season. People start to go indoors more and we know that immunity does wane over time.

The numbers of Americans traveling for Thanksgiving this year will be close to pre-pandemic levels, the federal Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has predicted, raising fears at a time when the Biden administration has struggled to get its vaccination message across.
The daily average of new cases has risen 29% in the last 14 days, analysis by the New York Times shows, while fewer than 60% of those eligible are fully vaccinated. Meanwhile, the 2021 US death toll from Covid has surpassed that of 2020, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Additionally, Joe Biden’s efforts to improve those figures through compulsory vaccination have stalled. The requirement for businesses of more than 100 employees remains blocked by the courts while Republican leaders in some states have kneecapped the president by enacting laws specifically outlawing such mandates.




Source: The Guardian.