The Biden Administration has no plans to stem future waves of Covid-19 through lockdown or shutdowns across the country, Jeff Zients, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, has announced.
Zients’ comments come as Austria enters its fourth nationwide lockdown and the Netherlands has imposed a partial lockdown amid an uncontrolled spike in Covid cases invading Europe.
Instead of implementing closures in the US, the government would bet on vaccines to keep the country operational in the event of another wave of Covid.
“We can slow the spread of the virus without having to shut down our economy in any way,” Zients said. “We have 82% of people now with a dose and more and more people are vaccinated every week,” collects CNBC.
Zients called for the continued use of vaccines, booster injections and monoclonal antibodies to prevent the United States from “backing down in any shape or form.”
Today, more than 60 million Americans have not yet been vaccinated against the coronavirus.
Covid cases in the U.S. stabilized between 70,000 and 75,000 a day for nearly three weeks starting in late October, but have since hit a seven-day average of nearly 92,400 a day as of Sunday, an increase from 16% from the prior week, according to a CNBC analysis of data from Johns Hopkins University.
Recently, the World Health Organization (WHO) urged the United States not to wait for a new wave of coronavirus to invade the country again and to start taking restrictive measures now.