[ad_1]
Lollapalooza had been given the green light weeks earlier, which city officials said was based on advice from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and messages from the White House. As a precaution, event organizers required attendees to present proof of vaccination or a negative Covid test from the past 72 hours.
The festival is also held outdoors, which helps to mitigate transmission. But with hospitalizations up 35%, Cook County was added on Thursday to CDC areas experiencing “substantial” Covid spread. And with the administration having revised its mask guidelines and with new revelations about the Delta variant, medical experts and some local politicians were already bracing for the worst.
“It really has the potential to be a super spreading event,” said Chicago Alderman Chris Taliaferro, member of the Progressive City Council Reform Caucus. “Unfortunately, we may have to face the consequences of this.”
The anxiety that was simmering in Chicago last week underscored how the emergence of the Delta variant has disrupted the White House’s plans for late summer and fall. A season supposed to mark the grand reopening of the company has, on the contrary, been overshadowed by the next chapter of the disease. And that left the Biden administration at a crossroads: eager to tout a country that is making progress but internally divided over how to handle the threats posed by the new strand of the virus and what steps Americans should take to make it happen. ‘protect it.
Senior Biden officials note that breakthrough infections among vaccinees are extremely rare, unlikely to be serious, and more likely to occur in crowded indoor environments. They have been openly frustrated with what they see as overly alarmed coverage of these cases.
Still, officials are increasingly concerned about the ability of fully vaccinated people infected with Delta to pass it on to others. There are also several lingering questions about Delta that the CDC is investigating – including whether and how asymptomatic people can transmit the virus – raising questions about the risk posed by those who choose not to wear masks.
All of this amounts to a grim political outlook for Biden. The White House had planned to focus now on the economy, jobs and infrastructure. Now he is forced to face questions about how schools will operate this fall in addition to housing advocates fearing the expiration of a moratorium on evictions on Saturday, which came after the White House delayed. to demand a legislative solution which could, these defenders warn, further hamper the fight against the pandemic.
“It used to only lead to poverty, evictions and homelessness,” said Sawyer Hackett, executive director of People First Future PAC at Julian Castro. Castro is a former secretary of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development. “Now it’s not just about poverty, evictions and homelessness, but the potential rise of a new variant that is going to spread like wildfire.”
The situation was serious enough last week that a longtime Democratic agent said Biden should consider issuing an official address to the nation to make it more clear where the fight against the pandemic is.
“Things are muddled at the moment,” said longtime party leader Simon Rosenberg. “There is resentment and frustration in the air. The reopening of schools will be difficult. “
Within the administration, the emergence of the Delta variant caused friction, leading to behind-the-scenes accusations and weeks-long tensions between the CDC and the White House. Two senior Biden officials familiar with the matter said the administration is still trying to balance the messages in a way that underscores the seriousness of the Delta variant while simultaneously reiterating that those vaccinated are not at risk.
“We thought we were going to get past that,” said a senior administration official. “It’s just like, here we go again.”
The revised mandate for the masks in particular has proven to be thorny. Officials from the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services have questioned whether recommending Americans to wear masks again would help fight the pandemic, with some officials at meetings over the past week arguing that the Reversal of directives could confuse people and trigger a political backlash.
Armed with analyzes in her department, CDC director Rochelle Walensky argued otherwise. She pressured Biden officials, including Biden’s chief medical officer, Anthony Fauci, to issue new recommendations urging fully vaccinated Americans to wear masks indoors, citing more recent data on the spread of the Delta variant and virus levels in vaccinated and unvaccinated people. According to two senior officials familiar with the conversations, Walensky insisted that doing nothing was not an option.
While Walensky has the backing of the president and other senior officials such as Fauci, his office and the White House have privately expressed their frustration with each other.
Those frustrations resurfaced when senior White House and health officials argued over data related to an outbreak of hundreds of vaccinated and unvaccinated people on Cape Cod. Although only a handful of immune and still infected people ended up in hospital, the number of infections among those who were immune was alarming. Still, officials questioned whether the administration had gathered enough data on the asymptomatic spread of the Delta variant to call on Americans to wear masks indoors again and whether Americans would adhere to the new guidelines.
The administration eventually revised the mask guidelines, calling on those vaccinated to wear face coverings indoors when in areas with high viral transmission. But internally, there are concerns about how the new posture will work.
“We declared ourselves somewhat successful when we were able to say that the vaccinated people did not have to mask themselves,” said an administration official. “It’s hard to make it look like we’re going back.”
Federal officials who spoke to POLITICO stressed that the Biden team has always known they should change their approach as the fight against Covid changes and new variants emerge. A senior administration official noted that analyzing real-time data on the trajectory of an ever-changing virus, and then developing appropriate public health recommendations for more than 330 million people, is not a task. easy.
While officials admitted there had been internal tensions, they also described it as a once-in-a-generation pandemic and said Americans expect and deserve a government that leads with data and science. The White House was encouraged last week by rising vaccination rates among the unvaccinated (it was the strongest in the country for the first vaccines since early June), believing their message is gaining ground. More progress could soon come as businesses and the federal government implement mandates or quasi-mandates to get their workforce vaccinated.
However, we are a long way from May, when Biden signaled the end of the wearing of masks among those vaccinated, and almost declared victory over Covid on July 4. And the question the White House now faces is whether it will ever be able to turn the clock back or if too much of the country – not just the Red States but the Blue Cities as well – is too ready to live as if the pandemic had passed.
In Chicago, Taliaferro said that if he then knew what he now knows about Covid – the rapid spread of the Delta variant, the possibility of breakthrough infections and the ability for those who are vaccinated to continue to spread the disease – the city council would have taken a different approach.
“There were a lot of factors that weren’t prevalent at the time,” continued the alderman. “We saw ourselves almost emerging from a pandemic. “
At a press conference last week, when asked if Lollapalooza has the potential to be a high profile event, Chicago Health Commissioner Dr Allison Arwady said she believed that the city was more responsible than other large gatherings across the country.
“I certainly hope we don’t see a big problem,” Arwady said.
Not everyone shares this point of view.
Dr Tina Tan, infectious disease expert at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine, in a statement on Lollapalooza, said, “This is a recipe for disaster.”
[ad_2]
Source link