Dr Fauci says Delta variant is our main issue with COVID – Best Life

Covid case declined in the United States, falling from high peaks they reached over the summer. But the question of where the pandemic is going is hanging as the country heads into winter. Last year in 2020, the winter months caused a massive increase through vacation travel and indoor gatherings. White House COVID Advisor Antoine Fauci, MD, recently offered his predictions of the COVID pandemic ahead of the coldest season, noting that while things are heading in the right direction, the decreasing case stiffness is not as promising as it was about a month ago. But that’s not the infectious disease expert’s only concern right now.

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During a November 10 press briefing with the White House COVID response team and public health officials, Fauci discussed concerns for Variants of COVID in the United States as the country heads into winter. According to the infectious disease expert, the Delta variant “still overwhelmingly dominates” the country.

“Right now our problem is definitely the Delta variant,” Fauci said at the briefing. He added that the Delta variant still causes about 99% of all COVID cases in the United States today.

Fauci also said officials are always “very vigilant” to watch for the emergence of other new variants. “We always keep an eye out for any available variant to determine whether or not it exceeds prevalence,” he said.

Currently, authorities are investigating a recently discovered mutation of the Delta variant, called Delta Plus. But at the end of October, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Rochelle Walensky, MD, told NBC News that Delta Plus had not taken off in the USA, as the country has only seen a handful of cases of this sub-variant.

“We don’t expect there to be an emergence of a variant that will surpass the capabilities of Delta“Fauci said during a press briefing by the White House COVID response team on October 13.

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According to Fauci, more vaccinations can help prevent new variants from having the chance to crop up like Delta, because all three vaccines are still very effective against most variants. The CDC recently said there was no evidence that Delta Plus escapes our current vaccines, in a statement to Business Insider. But Fauci assured health officials will continue to ensure that no variant completely escapes the vaccine’s effectiveness.

“When we get a new variant, we always do studies to see whether or not they escape monoclonal antibodies or convalescent plasma or vaccine-induced antibodies,” Fauci said in the November 10 briefing.

According to the CDC, 58.5% of the US population was fully vaccinated as of November 10. But Fauci noted that there were still around 66 million people eligible for vaccination who had not yet been vaccinated.

“A virus will not mutate or form a variant unless you give it the ability to replicate. So as long as you get… control over the dynamics of the virus in the community, which is best done by doing vaccinate the overwhelming proportion of the population, then we can prevent the emergence of new troublesome variants, ”Fauci explained in the October 13 briefing.

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