COVID-19 cases are on the rise in the United States – and could worsen in the coming months, U.S. federal health officials warned on Wednesday, urging the worst-affected areas to consider releasing calls for indoor camouflage.
The growing number of infections and hospitalizations with COVID-19 puts more of the country under the guidelines issued by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which calls for masking and other precautions for infection.
Currently, about a third of the US population lives in areas that are considered at risk – especially in the Northeast and Midwest. These are areas where people should already consider wearing masks indoors – but Americans elsewhere should also pay attention, officials said.
“Previous increases in infections in various waves of infections have shown that this is spreading across the country,” said Rochelle Valenski, director of the CDC, at a White House briefing with reporters.
For an increasing number of areas, “we call on local leaders to encourage the use of prevention strategies such as masks in public indoor and increase access to testing and treatment,” she said.
However, officials have been cautious in making specific predictions, saying how much worse the pandemic will get will depend on several factors, including the extent to which previous infections will protect against new options.
More funding is being sought to combat COVID
Last week, White House COVID-19 coordinator Dr. Ashish Ja warned in an interview with the Associated Press that the United States would become increasingly vulnerable to the coronavirus this fall and winter if Congress did not quickly approve new funding for more vaccines and treatments.
People walk past a COVID-19 test site in New York on Tuesday. (Spencer Platt / Getty Images)
He said the United States was already lagging behind other nations in securing supplies of the next generation of COVID-19 vaccines, and said the local home-based test production base was already drying up as demand dwindled.
Ja said local test manufacturers have begun closing lines and laying off workers, and in the coming weeks will begin selling off equipment and preparing to leave the test business entirely unless the U.S. government has the money to buy more tests, like the hundreds of millions you sent for free to households this year.
That would leave the United States relying on other countries to test supplies, risking shortages during the jump, Ja warned. About 8.5 million households have placed orders for the last tranche of eight free tests since the orders opened on Monday, Ja added.
The pandemic is now two and a half years old. And the United States has seen – depending on how you count them – five waves of COVID-19 during this time, with later jumps caused by mutated versions of the coronavirus.
The fifth wave occurred mainly in December and January, caused by the Omicron variant, which spread much faster than earlier versions.
A new wave on the horizon?
Some experts worry that the country is now seeing signs of a sixth wave driven by a sub-variant of Omicron. On Wednesday, Valenski saw steady growth in COVID-19 cases over the past five weeks, including a 26% increase nationally over the past week.
A man wearing a face mask and headphones walks past graffiti on Bowery’s wall in New York on Monday. (Shannon Stapleton / Reuters)
Hospitalizations have also increased by 19 percent in the past week, although she said they remain much lower than during the omicron wave.
In late February, as the wave eased, the CDC released a new set of community measures where COVID-19 eased its grip, with less focus on positive test results and more on what happens in hospitals.
Valenski said more than 32 percent of the country currently lives in areas with medium or high levels of the COVID-19 community, including more than nine percent at the highest level, where the CDC recommends using masks and other mitigation efforts. .
In the past week, an additional eight percent of Americans have lived in a county with a middle- or high-level COVID-19 community.
Officials said they were concerned that declining immunity and mitigation measures across the country could contribute to the continued rise in infections and diseases. They encouraged people – especially the elderly – to get boosters.
Some health experts say the government needs to take clearer and bolder steps.
CDC community-level guidelines are confusing to the public and do not provide a clear picture of how often the virus is transmitted in a community, said Dr. Lakshmi Ganapati, an infectious disease specialist at Harvard University.
When government officials make recommendations but do not set rules, “ultimately, each individual chooses and chooses the public health that works for them. But this is not effective. If you talk about stopping hospitalizations and even deaths, all of these interventions work better when people do it collectively, “she said.
The Associated Press’s Department of Health and Science receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Scientific Education. AP is solely responsible for all content.
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