CDC chief warns of 'potential fourth surge' and urges US to keep Covid rules
Dr
Rochelle Walensky, the director of the federal Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, warned on Monday that a recent increase in coronavirus
cases indicated a “fourth surge” could occur before a majority of the US is
vaccinated.
“At this level of cases, with variants spreading, we stand to
completely lose the hard-earned ground we have gained,” Walensky said, during a White House briefing.
“Now
is not the time to relax the critical safeguards that we know can stop the
spread of Covid-19 in our communities, not when we are so close. We have the
ability to stop a potential fourth surge of cases in this country.”
According to Johns Hopkins University, the US has
recorded more than 28.5m Covid-19 cases and nearly 513,000 deaths. Daily case
numbers fell steeply after a peak in January but have
started to increase again.
Jeff Zients,
coordinator of the White House coronavirus response team, said the single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine
which was approved for use on Saturday would start to be
delivered “as early as tomorrow”.
According
to Zients, Johnson & Johnson is ready to distribute 3.9m doses over the
coming days, adding to a vaccine stockpile already supplied by Pfizer-BioNTech
and Moderna, which both developed two-shot vaccines.
But
he added: “J&J has indicated that the supply will be limited for the next
couple of weeks.”
Johnson
& Johnson is expected to deliver 16m additional doses by the end of March,
but the White House coronavirus response team has warned governors that those
deliveries will occur “predominantly in the back half of the month”.
Zients assured Americans
that the federal government is ready to deliver the vaccine as soon as doses
become available, saying: “We’ve done the planning. We have the distribution
channels in place.”
He also announced that the US distributed an average of 1.7m doses a day
over the past week. Vaccine distribution had rebounded after a winter storm
affected deliveries across the central US, he said.
According to Bloomberg, about 2.4m vaccine doses were administered in the US on Sunday.