CDC Director Rochelle Walensky Says Covid Cases Projected to Sharply Decline by July, But Warns Variants Are Still a ‘Wild Card’
Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the CDC, struck an optimistic tone during Wednesday’s White House Covid-19 Task Force news briefing, as she shared the news that models were predicting “a sharp decline in cases by July 2021.”
Referencing an article published by the CDC in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly report, Walensky noted that the models “forecasted some really good news and important reminder” to continue both spread mitigation and vaccination efforts.
“In good news, the models projected a sharp decline in cases by July 2021 and an even faster decline if more people get vaccinated sooner,” she said. “The results remind us that we have the path out of this, and models once projecting really grim news now offer reasons to be quite hopeful for what the summer may bring.”
The results are based on six different models that looked at four different scenarios with “different vaccination coverage rates and effectiveness estimates and strength and implementation of nonpharmaceutical intervention” (such as mask-wearing or social distancing).
However, the optimistic outlook comes with a caveat — the report states that “high vaccination rates and compliance with public health prevention measures are essential to control the Covid-19 pandemic and to prevent surges in hospitalizations and deaths in the coming months.”
The models’ most optimistic outcome — based on high vaccination rates and moderate compliance with mitigation efforts — found that weekly national cases could drop below 50,000 by the end of July, weekly hospitalizations could fall below 1,000, and deaths would only be a few hundred per week.
“Although we are seeing progress in terms of decreased cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, variants are a wild card that could reverse this progress we have made and could set us back,” Walensky cautioned. “Reassuringly, as Dr. [Anthony] Fauci said Friday, we are seeing that our current vaccines are protecting against the predominant variants circulating in the country.”
Watch above, via Reuters.
