Top U.S. infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci said the United States is “going in the wrong direction,” with COVID-19 cases.
Speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union” program Sunday, Fauci said “Fifty percent of the country is not vaccinated. That’s a problem.”
Fauci’s comments came as a surge in coronavirus cases, due primarily to the spread of the delta variant, first identified in India, sweeps through regions where people have been resistant to getting vaccinated.
“We’re putting ourselves in danger,” said Fauci, the top medical adviser to President Joe Biden.
He said vaccinated people “are highly protected,” including against the delta variant. But the pace of vaccinations has dropped in the U.S. by more than 80% since mid-April.
Some cities, including Los Angeles in the West and St. Louis in the middle of the country, have imposed new orders for people to wear masks in public indoor spaces regardless of vaccination status. Other cities are considering similar directives.
In China, health officials reported 76 new COIVD cases Sunday. The cluster in the eastern city of Nanjing is the highest number of cases reported in the Asian country since January, according to Reuters.
In Bangkok, anti-government protesters were met with a large police presence Sunday, as Thailand struggles to curb the spread of surging COVID-19 cases.
Hundreds of activists took to the streets in the capital calling for political reforms, continuing the demands of a widespread anti-government movement last year, coupled with anger at the slow rollout of vaccines against the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.
Early this year, demonstrations paused for months as authorities cracked down on activists and cases of COVID-19 rose. The resurgence of the protests comes as Thailand faces its worse wave of COVID-19 cases.
Since April, Thailand’s third wave has brought hundreds of thousands of new infections, leading the government to impose strict lockdowns across heavily hit provinces, including Bangkok. Public spaces were closed Friday as part of a wider effort to reduce the spread of the virus.
But Sunday saw more than 15,000 new cases of COVID-19 and more than 100 deaths, the highest since the pandemic began, according to local media reports.
To date, only about 5% of the country’s population of almost 70 million people has been fully vaccinated against COVID-19.
In the U.S., an increasing number of parents opted to use the curriculums of homeschooling associations for their children during the coronavirus outbreak, according to a report by the U.S. Census Bureau. Homeschooling figures jumped last year from 5.4% in March to 11% by September, the report found, while the there was a spike in African American households, with an increase from 3.3% to 16.1%.
On Monday, data from the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center shows that over 190, 000,000 COVID-19 global cases have been confirmed and 4,159,108 deaths recorded.
