The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued a new urgent COVID-19 warning about the virus situation in the US.
According to Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), who recently dropped in an interview with JAMA on Wednesday that health officials are very concerned with the new emerging strains of COVID-19.
What is most concerning is that health officials don’t have “the capacity to detect them, to understand their impact and to understand, what we were going to do with the information, how we were going to stop them from emerging.”
The head of the CDC continued, and warned that the new strains will likely become the dominant strain in the country by March. Dr. Walensky says that the new strains becoming the dominant strain in the country can be linked to its increase in transmissibility (B.1.1.7), and the fact that some states are loosening public health laws because they have noticed the number of new cases decrease over the recent weeks.
On top of that, Dr. Walensky said because the numbers are dropping and some states are loosening laws around public health safety guidelines, many people may not feel it necessary to get a vaccine. “Around that time, I worry that life will feel and look a little bit better.
And the motivation for those who don’t, who might be vaccine hesitant will be diminished. At some point there’s going to be an inflection point of, there will be more vaccine when we have people who want to take it. And at that point we still need to be scaling up vaccination.