Fauci sees the United States gaining control of the pandemic next fall

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – U.S. chief infectious disease specialist Dr. Anthony Fauci said Wednesday he expects America to achieve enough collective immunity COVID-19 through vaccines to regain “some resemblance to normalcy” in the fall of 2021, despite the first setbacks in the deployment of vaccines.

Fauci made his remarks during an online discussion of the pandemic with California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who announced from the outset that a more infectious variant of the coronavirus originally found in Britain has been detected in his state. day after the first known case was documented in the United States in Colorado.

Newsom said the B.1.1.7 coronavirus variant had been confirmed earlier in the day in a patient in Southern California. He did not provide further details. But the California Department of Public Health said in a later statement that the person, a San Diego County patient, has no known travel history, suggesting the variant extends to the community.

Fauci said he was not “surprised,” adding that additional cases of the variant would likely appear across the country and that the mutant nature of these viruses is normal.

“It seems that this particular mutation makes the virus better transmitted from one person to another,” he said. However, people infected with previous forms of SARS-CoV-2 “do not appear to be re-infected with it,” meaning that any immunity already acquired “is protective against this particular strain,” Fauci added.

She also stressed that it is believed that the so-called UK variant is no more serious in the disease it causes and that the recently approved COVID-19 vaccines will be as effective against it as against known forms of the virus.

The same is believed to be the case with a second new variant, also more infectious, which was first reported in South Africa, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

However, the emergence of a more highly transmissible variant could make rapid deployment of immunizations even more critical.

President-elect Joe Biden warned Tuesday that it could take years to inoculate most Americans with an initial vaccine distribution rate that has lagged behind the Trump administration’s promises. He asked Congress to approve more funding for the effort.

“WE’RE GOING TO TAKE”

Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Wednesday that he was confident of overcoming the initial problems in vaccine distribution.

“As we enter January, the feeling is that we will gain momentum to be able to catch up,” he told Newsom, saying he hoped the vaccines would be widely available to the general public on request, in April.

Assuming that the extensive vaccination campaign is advancing as it should be until May, June and July, “by the beginning of autumn, we will have good enough herd immunity to be able to really return to a strong appearance of normalcy: schools , theaters, sporting events, restaurants, “Fauci said.

However, the prospect of fighting a more contagious form of the virus comes as the pandemic has been largely out of control in much of the United States for weeks. California, the most populous state with 40 million, has become the latest turning point, as hospitals in and around Los Angeles report that intensive care units are full.

Medical experts attribute a worsening pandemic in recent weeks to the arrival of colder weather and the fact that many Americans fail to comply with public health warnings to avoid unnecessary social gatherings and travel during the final holiday season. of the year.

The result has been an alarming wave of infections and hospitalizations that have helped health care systems to their limits and a steady death toll in the United States, which has surpassed the 338,000 lives lost nationwide so far.

In addition to facing daily social life in the United States, the pandemic has suffocated the economy and left millions of workers in numbers that have not been seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The first U.S. case of the UK variant was announced Tuesday by Colorado Gov. Jared Polis. At a news conference on Wednesday, Polis described the infected patient as a National Guard soldier in his twenties who had been assigned to help deal with an outbreak of COVID at a nursing home in Simla, Colorado. , on the outskirts of the Denver metropolitan area.

The patient, isolating and recovering at home, has no history of recent trips, according to Dr. Henry Walke, responsible for incidents of the CDC’s COVID response, which is a person-to-person transmission sign of the variant in the United States.

The director of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment told reporters that a second member of the National Guard could also have hired the UK variant, although final confirmation from the lab was still awaited.

The new variant has been detected in several European countries, as well as in Canada, Australia, India, South Korea and Japan, among others.

The U.S. government on Monday began demanding that all airline passengers arriving from Britain, including U.S. citizens, give a negative COVID-19 within 72 hours of departure.

The government could extend coronavirus testing requirements for international air travelers beyond Britain as early as next week, sources informed of the matter told Reuters on Wednesday.