Things are beginning to look up in the country’s ongoing fight against COVID-19 – according Johns Hopkins University data, the number of new cases has gone down by 24% compared to last week. Hospitalizations have also decreased by 12.53%, compared to the previous week, per the COVID Tracking Project
The CDC also reports that around 10% of the population have received at least one dose of the vaccine – which amounts to nearly 32.9 million people. 9.8 million people have been fully vaccinated.
And the supply of vaccines has also seen an increase in recent week. “The increase is 5% this week over last week, but it’s 28% across the last three weeks,” White House Covid-19 response coordinator Jeff Zients said. “I think it’s the manufacturers doing a good job and the President and the team doing all we can to support that manufacturing process.”
In light of the recent improvements, some states have eased up on the safety precautions and emergency health mandates.
But although the COVID-19 stats certainly seem to be improving, health experts are cautioning against easing restrictions too soon – especially with the new, highly contagious variants of the virus now in the U.S.
According to Dr. Richard Besser, former acting director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it’s “incredibly risky” to begin doing away with precautions now.
“It is absolutely essential that we continue to do steps beyond vaccination to keep this under control,” Dr. Besser said, explaining, “The reason for that is that the more this virus is allowed to spread in our communities, the more we’re going to see these variants spreading.”
Researchers believe most of the new strains are more contagious compared to the original virus due to their mutations, which has affected the spike protein – the part of the virus which attaches to human cells.
One COVID-19 variant, which was first discovered in the U.K., was found in less than 10 people in the U.S. at the start of the year – it has since spread to more than 900 people in the U.S., according to CDC data published Tuesday (February 9).
Dr. Leana Wen, an emergency physician and visiting professor at George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health, cautions that the spread of the new variant could be “something really potentially catastrophic, and we should be doubling down on the measures that we know to work,”
“We’re … seeing what happens in other countries when these variants take over,” she said. “There is (an) explosive surge, even when the countries are basically in shutdown.”
These mutations have also had researchers expressing concern about the vaccines’ effectivity – something Dr. Besser also reiterated.
“And if the vaccines aren’t as effective against some of these variants, then we could see the gains that we’re so excited about right now, we could see those reversed in a very short amount of time,” he said.
