Dr Fauci warns US to see ‘skyrocket’ in Covid cases after the holidays

US likely to see ‘skyrocket’ in Covid-19 cases after Thanksgiving and in the run-up to Christmas as crowds of shoppers and holiday shoppers threaten to fuel an already raging epidemic, White House coronavirus adviser Dr Anthony Fauci said on Tuesday. .

“If you look across the United States, we’re really in a public health crisis right now,” Fauci told Colorado Governor Jared Polis in a live broadcast session Tuesday. “Now that we are in the middle or late fall, merging with winter, we have seen, due to various circumstances, a surge that has truly overtaken others.”

Covid-19 cases were already on the rise before Thanksgiving, when more than 3 million people passed through airports across the country, marking the busiest travel weekend since lockdown orders in mid-March. For weeks, public health experts have warned that the impending winter could be the “darkest” part of the pandemic to date.

Given the number of people who have traveled for Thanksgiving and shared meals with family and friends, the United States is likely to see a “skyrocket” in Covid-19 cases in the weeks to come, Fauci said.

The United States has recorded an average of 162,364 new cases of Covid-19 per day over the past week, a drop in reports that experts say could be temporary as health services work on a backlog of cases of the holidays, according to a CNBC analysis of the compiled data. by Johns Hopkins University.

“One of the things that you should keep an eye out for is that as we have two to three weeks past the Thanksgiving holiday, it’s likely … you’re going to start to see the curve that had flattened back to new, unless people have really done a considerable degree of mitigation, ”Fauci said.

America is not out of the woods after Thanksgiving. The next 30 days or more will be a time of “precarious risk” as some people start shopping for Christmas gifts in stores and throwing New Years Eve parties, Fauci warned.

Meanwhile, more and more people are falling seriously ill from the virus. More than 93,000 patients were hospitalized with Covid-19 on Monday, a record number since the start of the pandemic, according to data from the COVID Tracking Project, managed by reporters from The Atlantic. The coronavirus kills an average of more than 1,400 people every day in the United States, according to data from Hopkins.

“It’s something that’s quite problematic, and to say it’s difficult is really to say the least,” Fauci said.

Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, reiterated that the United States should have enough Covid-19 vaccines for the general population by April 2021. It is possible that an “overwhelming majority “Americans be vaccinated against the disease in the second quarter of next year, allowing schools to return and businesses to safely reopen in the fall,” he said.