Virus infection rates keep dropping ….(2/21/2021)

• Cases have fallen more than 40 percent over the last two weeks and more than 70 percent since the January peak. Fewer people are testing positive each day than at any point since late October.
• Deaths remain extraordinarily high, with more than 2,600 announced on Thursday alone. In the coming days, the country is likely to reach 500,000 total deaths. But reports of new deaths are finally starting to slow.
• About 62,000 coronavirus patients were hospitalized nationwide as of Thursday, according to the Covid Tracking Project. That’s a decline of more than 50 percent in just over a month.
• As of Friday, the 11 states with the highest rates of recent cases all border the Atlantic Ocean. New York and New Jersey are adding cases at rates higher than every state except South Carolina.
• Though case numbers have fallen somewhat in South Carolina, the Spartanburg, Gaffney and Orangeburg areas still have some of the worst outbreaks in the country.
• Highly infectious variants continue to emerge across the country, potentially undermining some of the progress of the last month. Even as the federal government ramps up tracking efforts, the pervasiveness of those variants remains largely unclear.
• About 12 percent of people in the country have received at least one vaccine dose, and about 5 percent are fully vaccinated. After weather-related delays, federal officials have said they hope for the pace of vaccination to rebound soon.

NY Times…Link....

Dr Fauci on extended mask wearing into 2022….

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser for Covid-19, said on Sunday that Americans may still be wearing masks outside their homes a year from now, even as he predicted the country would return to “a significant degree of normality” by fall.

“I want it to keep going down to a baseline that’s so low there is virtually no threat,” Dr. Fauci said on the CNN program “State of the Union,” referring to the number of cases nationally that would make him comfortable enough to stop recommending universal masking. “If you combine getting most of the people in the country vaccinated with getting the level of virus in the community very, very low, then I believe you’re going to be able to say, for the most part, we don’t necessarily have to wear masks.”….

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