Top Biden health officials sound warning on rising covid infections

Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, strongly encouraged those living in communities designated yellow or orange, indicating they have large numbers of new infections and hospitalizations, to consider wearing masks in indoor public spaces and taking other steps to protect themselves.

“As we’re currently seeing a steady rise of cases in parts of the country, we encourage everyone to use the menu of tools we have today to prevent further infection and severe disease, including wearing a mask, getting tested, accessing treatments early if infected and getting vaccinated or boosted,” she said.

How big is the latest U.S. coronavirus wave? No one really knows.

Wednesday’s warnings from Walensky and two other officials — Ashish Jha, White House coronavirus coordinator, and Anthony S. Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser — came on the same day the United States surpassed the grim milestone of 1 million covid-19 deaths, a toll that even the starkest predictions at the start of the pandemic in 2020 did not anticipate.

While officials stressed that the current situation is far less dire than the winter omicron-variant surge, they cautioned that the country will be ill prepared to respond effectively in coming months if Congress does not soon appropriate billions of dollars in coronavirus aid to buy a new tranche of antiviral treatments, vaccines and tests.

Walensky said the seven-day average of new infections has climbed to about 94,000 per day, an increase of 26 percent over the previous week and a threefold increase over the past month. Hospitalizations are also beginning to rise, she said, with admissions increasing about 19 percent over the previous week, to about 3,000 per day.

Administration officials and experts have said they expect a summer surge in the South as the heat forces people indoors, as has happened the two previous summers. Some experts have warned this summer’s surge could be worse than last year’s, because cases are higher than they were in May 2021. ...