Rochelle Walensky, MD, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Director, says that she fears “impending doom” as COVID deaths in the US edge upwards as people increasingly ignore health restrictions and start to travel.
Beginning her usual COVID status update, Dr Walensky spoke as she often did of “concerning trends in the data.”
Dr Walensky spoke about the country surpassing 30 million COVID cases; of a 10% increase in the 7-day average of COVID-19 cases over the past week, to slightly below 60 000 cases; and of an uptick in hospitalisations, from a 7-day average of around 4600 per day to around 4800 per day.
“And deaths, which typically lag behind cases and hospitalizations, have now started to rise,” she said, pointing to a nearly 3% increase to a 7-day average of “approximately 1000 deaths per day.”
“I’m going to pause here,” she said. “I’m going to lose the script and I’m going to reflect on the recurring feeling I have of impending doom.”
At the start of her tenure, Walensky said she had pledged to always tell the truth even if it wasn’t something Americans wanted to hear.
“We have so much to look forward to, so much promise and potential of where we are, and so much reason for hope. But right now I’m scared,” she said.
She recalled her time caring for COVID patients, saying: “I know what it’s like as a physician to stand in that patient room, gowned, gloved, masked, shielded and to be the last person to touch someone else’s loved one because their loved one couldn’t be there.
“I know what it’s like when you’re the physician, when you’re the healthcare provider, and you’re worried that you don’t have the resources to care for the patients in front of you.”
She also recalled “that feeling of nausea, when you read the ‘Crisis Standards of Care’ and you wonder whether there are going to be enough ventilators to go around and who’s going to make that choice.”
She emphasised that she was speaking “not only as your CDC director, but as a wife, as a mother, as a daughter, to ask you to just please hold on a little while longer.”
She sympathised, she said, with those “wanting to be done” with the pandemic.
“We are just almost there, but not quite yet. And so I’m asking you to just hold on a little longer, to get vaccinated when you can. So that all of those people that we all love will still be here when this pandemic ends.”
Dr Walensky warned that the US pandemic trajectory was looking dangerously similar to that of European countries like Germany that were still struggling to contain the virus.
“We are not powerless. We can change this trajectory of the pandemic,” she said.
“But it will take all of us recommitting to following the public health prevention strategies consistently while we work to get the American public vaccinated.”
According to the New York Times’ COVID vaccination tracker, 146 million vaccinations have been administered in the US to date, with 2.76 million doses being given daily. At this rate, 70% of the adult population will have been vaccinated by June 16.
She urged community and religious leaders, officials, and other influencers to help support the vaccination programme.
“For the health of our country, we must work together now to prevent a fourth surge.”
Source: MedPage Today
