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Americans are now infected with COVID-19 at a rate 10 times the rate needed to end the pandemic, which will persist until more people are vaccinated, NIAID director Anthony Fauci told Axios .
Threat level: “The end of the game is to remove the virus. At the moment we’re still in pandemic mode, because we have 160,000 new infections a day. It’s not even a modestly good control… which means it is. a threat to public health. “
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“In a country our size, you can’t hang around and have 100,000 infections a day. You have to go well below 10,000 before you start to feel comfortable,” Fauci said.
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Once enough people have been vaccinated, he adds, “you will still have infected people, but you are not going to view it as a threat to public health.”
Between the lines: Despite all the buzz surrounding the Mu variant, which appears to elude certain protective properties of licensed vaccines and past infections, the Delta variant continues to dominate in the United States and around the world.
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The good news: Fauci says that means currently licensed vaccinations are still effective.
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The bad news: Not enough Americans are taking action against the Delta variant, which has already upped the ante.
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And, the longer it takes to end this pandemic phase, the more likely we are to end up with a “monster variant” that not only escapes vaccines, but too is dangerously transmissible.
Go further: COVID vaccines are still the end of the pandemic
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