United States President Joe Biden's administration has issued a stark warning to Americans that the country could potentially see 100 million COVID-19 cases this fall and winter amid a lack of funding for coronavirus-related programs.
The projection of the grim possibility is an estimate based on a range of outside models that the Biden administration closely tracks. A senior administration official said they would include both the fall and winter.
COVID-19 Warning
Authorities said that the estimate was largely based on an underlying assumption that no additional resources or extra mitigation measures were being taken against the coronavirus pandemic. This includes COVID-19 funding from Congress or dramatic new variants that could accelerate the spread of the infection.
White House officials shared the estimates as they renewed their push to get Congress to approve additional funding to combat the health crisis. The House's COVID-19 response coordinator, Dr. Ashish Jha, confirmed the warning in an interview on Sunday.
The health professional, however, stressed that whether the possibility occurs or not is largely up to the people of the country. He said that officials were monitoring internal and external models and predicted waning immunity among the people of the nation, as per CNN.
Negotiators were previously able to reach an agreement on a scaled-back $10 billion package, but in April, Congress left Washington without passing that bipartisan bill. The situation came due to a disagreement over the Title 42 immigration policy. This pandemic-era rule allowed migrants to be returned immediately to their home countries, citing a public health emergency.
Biden's administration has been requesting $22.5 billion in supplemental COVID-19 relief funding since March, a provision that was stripped from a bill that was later passed. The money would have gone towards more testing, treatments, therapeutics, and preventing future outbreaks.
According to News12, officials said that the United States would be left unprepared for future waves without the new funding for coronavirus-related programs. The projection was made on Friday by a senior Biden administration official.
The Situation of the Health Crisis
Many experts agreed that a major coronavirus wave this fall and winter was completely possible with the current situation of the pandemic. They argued that loosened restrictions and the rise of variants that are better able to escape immune protections are some of the factors in play.
Several have also warned that the country's return to more relaxed behaviors, such as going maskless to participating in crowded indoor social gatherings, would lead to more infections. Data showed that the seven-day national average of new infections more than doubled from 29,312 on Mar. 30 to nearly 71,000 on Friday.
An epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health, Justin Lesser, said that the warning was reasonable. He added that it was just on the pessimistic side of what many projected in the COVID-19 scenario modeling run.
The expert said it would always be difficult to predict the future when it was about the coronavirus but noted that the country was now at a point where it was more difficult. He noted so much sensitivity in terms of long-term trends, the Washington Post reported.
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