Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, sounded the alarm Friday over what she described as potentially stalling progress in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic, noting that fast-spreading variants of the virus are becoming more prevalent in the United States.
Speaking at a White House briefing on Friday, Walensky said the stall threatens to erase progress the US has made in recent weeks in decreasing cases and hospitalizations, even as the rollout of lifesaving vaccines ramps up.
Walensky said the number of new cases has been increasing in the last three days, compared with the prior week. She also shared new estimates that suggest the more-transmissible U.K. coronavirus variant now makes up about 10 percent of US cases.
“We at CDC consider this a very concerning shift in the trajectory,” Walensky said. “It’s important to remember where we are in the pandemic. Things are tenuous. Now is not the time to relax restrictions.”
Walensky’s comments came a day after Governor Charlie Baker laid out a plan that would dramatically ease coronavirus restrictions in Massachusetts by the end of March, allowing fans to return to sports venues and easing capacity restrictions and gathering limits.
“We would not be here making this announcement if we didn’t think we had seen, for . . . almost two months now, positive trends on cases and hospitalizations,” Baker said at his announcement on Thursday.
But Walensky, the former head of infectious diseases at Mass General, on Friday signaled that it was too soon to ease restrictions and urged the public to allow for more time in vaccinating people.
“We may be done with the virus, but clearly the virus is not done with us. We cannot get comfortable or give in to a false sense of security that the worst of the pandemic is behind us, not now, not when mass vaccination is so very close,” she said.
Christina Prignano can be reached at christina.prignano@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @cprignano.
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February 26, 2021 at 11:48PM
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‘Now is not the time to relax restrictions:’ CDC chief Walensky sounds alarm on ‘stalling’ progress in pandemic - The Boston Globe
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