The White House Covid team has told the American public that
“there is no need to lockdown” the country amid the spread of the Omicron variant, but that getting vaccinated and taking booster shots is essential.
Jeff Zients, White House coronavirus response coordinator, and CDC director Rochelle Walensky both remarked at the briefing just now how the government and the public have “far more tools” to fight Covid that everyone had a year ago.
It’s been a year since the first person in the US was officially vaccinated after the first vaccine was given emergency use authorization by the federal regulator following successful testing – when a New York City intensive care unit nurse, Sandra Lindsay, got the shot. At that point, 300,000 people in the US had already been killed by Covid, a figure which has now reached 800,000.
Zients said that 95% of Americans are eligible to be vaccinated and that should be the route everyone chooses to protect against the virus.
“We know how to keep our kids in school, and businesses open and we are not going to shut down our economy in any way,” he said.
A reporter at the press briefing asked how worried, in the overall sense,a weary public should be about the pandemic, a winter surge and Omicron, given the data that it is spreading fast but perhaps is milder than the Delta strain.
Chief medical adviser to the president, Anthony Fauci, put it bluntly.
“If you are unvaccinated, you are very vulnerable, not only to the Delta surge we are currently experiencing but also to Omicron,” he said.
About early reports of the effects of Omicron being milder than previous strains, Fauci said that, if you are unvaccinated, it did not matter, you are vulnerable.
He added it was difficult to “read the tea leaves”, but the public should do what the officials keep saying, using the tools of, particularly, vaccinations and boosters, as well as using mask indoors with crowds. Fauci said last week he wears a mask indoors if he’s at gatherings with people whose vaccination status he does not know.
“If we did not have these tools I would be telling you to really, really be worried. So get vaccinated, get boosted…we take this very seriously,” he said.