U.S. health officials are waiting to see if more contagious coronavirus variants upend the country’s progress in its battle against the virus.
Most communities remain at an extremely high risk of contracting the virus, like New York City, above. But transmission seems to be slowing throughout the country, with the number of new average cases 40 percent lower on Jan. 29 than at the U.S. peak three weeks earlier.
Still, the average reported daily death rate over the past seven days was above 3,000, and we are by no means out of the woods yet.
Variants threaten to send case rates to a new high if they take hold, as health officials have warned may be the case by March.
Maryland and South Carolina identified their first cases of the variant from South Africa. A variant from Brazil was detected in Minnesota this week, and one from Britain has been detected in at least 30 states.
“It is a pivotal moment,” one virologist said. “It is a race with the new variants to get a large number of people vaccinated before those variants spread.”
In recent days, Johnson & Johnson and Novavax have each announced that their vaccines provided strong protection against Covid-19 but that their efficacy rate dropped against the South African variant.
The New York Times
