Anthony Stephen Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and chief medical advisor to the president, said that the drop in Covid-19 cases should not be attributed to vaccines’ roll out just yet.
The statement comes as the country witnessed a slight drop in the Covid-19 hospitalisation rate.
“I don’t think the dynamics of what we’re seeing now with the plateauing is significantly influenced, yet — it will be soon — but yet by the vaccine,” Fauci said on NBC’s Today on Monday morning.
He said that the drop has rather happened naturally, following the holiday season in December.
“We don’t want to get complacent and think ... ‘Oh, things are going in the right direction, we can pull back a bit,’ because we do have to circulate in the country a variant from the UK that’s in over 20 states right now,” Dr. Fauci said to NBC.
While commenting on the new strain of the virus that emerged in the United Kingdom, Fauci said: “I’m pretty convinced there is a degree of increase in the seriousness of the actual infection.”
As per the Covid Tracking Project, Covid-19 hospitalisations have slightly declined since they reached their peak of 132,474 people hospitalised on 6 January. The total number of people in hospitals as on January 24 stood at 110,628.
The number of new cases per day has also slumped. However, the US was still averaging about 4,000 deaths per day from the infection.
Experts have speculated that the pandemic may take the worst shape over the next month before it gets better, and the US would likely reach over 500,000 Americans dead from Covid-19 in February.