Team Biden race against time as new strain threatens to intensify wave of Covid | Coronavirus

Joe Biden’s new administration faces a monumental task to curb the deadliest wave of the Covid-19 pandemic to date in a race against time before a new, more contagious variant of the coronavirus already threatens resources health care providers already requested.

The Biden administration has only a few weeks to speed up vaccine rollout and convince more Americans to wear masks, wash their hands and socially distance themselves. And it must be done against a backdrop of difficult transition, critical supply shortages, new widespread infections, fragile public confidence and a vaccine rollout that “has so far been a dismal failure.”

“Let me be very clear, things are going to keep getting worse before they get better,” Biden said, during a Covid-19 briefing Thursday afternoon. “The memorial we organized last night,” to mark 400,000 American dead, “will not be the last. The death toll will likely hit 500,000 next month. “

According to federal health authorities.

At the same time, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has now issued stern warnings regarding a new, more infectious variant of Covid-19, called B117. The variant has already forced England into a weeklong lockdown.

Various scenarios could unfold. In one model, Covid-19 infections decrease in March, rising to the end of April and early May due to B117 infections. This model assumed that there was no generalized community vaccination. In another model, B117 still exceeds the current strains, but it decreases with the current dominant strains. The decline would occur in an environment of globally reduced transmission, as people maintain their social distancing and vaccines are distributed to around 1 million per day.

That endpoint can be reached, CDC modellers said, but only if people curb the spread of Covid-19 and the vaccination rate is high. Biden has repeatedly pledged to vaccinate 100 million Americans in 100 days, which would roughly match the CDC’s model.

“We need to ask average Americans to do their part,” said Jeff Zients, White House director of Covid-19 response. “Beating the virus requires a coordinated national effort.”

In the worst-case scenario, already strained hospitals would come under more pressure, social distancing would have to be tighter and more extensive, and more people would need to be vaccinated to make a difference. This scenario more closely matches England’s lockdown, which began when cases peaked in early January.

Additionally, while B117 is the only variant known to be more contagious currently in circulation, it is not the only variant to be feared. Strains identified in South Africa and Brazil also have the potential to be more transmissible, CDC researchers said.

Faced with these new variants, Biden and his administration spent his first evening and a full day in the infrastructure of office buildings to respond to the crisis.

“The problem he wakes up to every day centers on containing the pandemic,” Jen Psaki, White House press secretary, said at the first press briefing on Wednesday night. “The problem he lies down on every night is to bring the pandemic under control.”

Biden signed a wave of executive orders to try to control the situation, including creating new federal vaccination sites, using the Defense Production Act to increase much-needed supplies, requiring masks to be worn on federal property and many other actions.

Zients acknowledged Thursday that the Trump administration’s vaccine rollout planning was “much worse than we could have imagined,” The New York Times reported.

The buy-in of US state governments is also important for the timely and equitable distribution of vaccines. Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who was closely linked to Donald Trump, held a press conference on Wednesday to tell Biden not to bother coming to his state.

“I’ve seen some of this stuff that Biden is posting, that he’s going to set up these Fema camps. I can tell you it’s not necessary in Florida, ”DeSantis said, The Tampa Bay Times reported. “All we need is more vaccine. Just get us more vaccines.

Additionally, the urgency to vaccinate people has led some public health officials to be reluctant to document that those vaccinated are members of priority groups, such as the elderly or essential workers.

In Mississippi, the state’s top health official, Dr Thomas Dobbs, said demanding documents was not something the state was “going to do” because it did not want to put up documents. immunization barriers. He added: “We will get [the] vaccinate where we can as much as possible, ”he said Thursday. “It’s going to be a little lumpy, and that’s how it is.”