Passengers arrive on American Airlines flights at O’Hare International Airport on February 5, 2021 in Chicago, Illinois.
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The United States could see yet another increase in coronavirus, even as vaccines against Covid-19 increase rapidly across the country, while states relax restrictions and there are more Americans traveling for spring break. warned on Monday the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“With the warmer weather coming, I know it’s tempting to want to relax and drop our guard,” CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walenksy said at a news conference Monday. “Particularly after a harsh winter that unfortunately experienced the highest level of cases and deaths during the pandemic to date.”
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) examined more than 1.34 million people on Sunday, 86,000 more than on the same day last year, just after the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic.
TSA projections exceeded one million every day since Thursday, getting the best stretch of a year. While air travel is well below 2019 levels, there are more Americans returning to the sky despite indications from the CDC warning against non-essential travel, even for those who are fully vaccinated.
Although many U.S. colleges cut back on spring break in an effort to curb holidays and infections, top Biden administration officials are still concerned about travelers who “enjoy spring break holidays. , no masks, ”Walensky said.
“I am begging you, for the good of our nation’s health,” Walenksy said at a news conference Monday. “Cases went up last spring, they went up again in the summer, they will go up now if we stop taking precautions when we continue to vaccinate more and more people.”
Even with declining infections and a rapidly expanding vaccine rollout, the U.S. continues to report a dangerously high base of daily cases that could be reversed if Americans left the guard, top officials have warned. of Biden’s health. According to the CDC, about 37.5 million people, about 11% of the U.S. population, are completely vaccinated in the United States.
The United States has come a long way since early January, when it peaked at just over 250,000 new cases daily, based on a weekly average. Now, the nation reports a daily average of 53,670 new infections over the past week, down 10% from a week ago, according to a CNBC data analysis compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
– Leslie Josephs of CNBC and the Associated Press contributed to this report.