Top Biden health officials sound warning on rising covid infections

Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, strongly encouraged those living in communities designated yellow or orange, indicating they have large numbers of new infections and hospitalizations, to consider wearing masks in indoor public spaces and taking other steps to protect themselves.

“As we’re currently seeing a steady rise of cases in parts of the country, we encourage everyone to use the menu of tools we have today to prevent further infection and severe disease, including wearing a mask, getting tested, accessing treatments early if infected and getting vaccinated or boosted,” she said.

Wednesday’s warnings from Walensky and two other officials — Ashish Jha, White House Covid-19 Response Coordinator, and Anthony S. Fauci, Biden’s chief medical adviser — came on the same day the United States surpassed the grim milestone of 1 million covid deaths, a toll that even the starkest predictions at the start of the pandemic in 2020 did not anticipate.

While officials stressed the current situation is far less dire than the winter omicron surge, they cautioned the country would be ill-prepared to respond effectively in coming months if Congress does not soon appropriate billions of dollars in covid aid to purchase a new tranche of antiviral treatments, vaccines and tests.

Walensky said the seven-day average of new infections has climbed to about 94,000 per day, an increase of 26 percent over the previous week and a threefold increase over the last month. Hospitalizations are also beginning to rise, she said, with admissions increasing about 19 percent over the previous week, to about 3,000 per day.

Biden officials and experts have said they expect a summer surge in the South as the heat forces people indoors, as happened the two previous summers. Some experts have warned this summer’s surge could be worse than last year’s because cases are currently higher than they were in May 2021.

They have also warned of a possible fall and winter wave that could result in about 1 million daily coronavirus infections driven by omicron subvariants that have shown a remarkable ability to escape immunity. That wave could be deadly if the administration cannot buy more vaccines, antivirals, tests and high quality masks, officials said.

“We have a pretty high degree of immunity in our population,” Jha said. “But we’re also seeing at this moment a lot of infections across the country. … What is primarily driving that is these incredibly contagious subvariants….