Dr Anthony Fauci said on Sunday that it was too early to say whether Americans can hold large family gatherings to celebrate Christmas this year as the Delta variant of the coronavirus continued to spread in spite of government restrictions.
The US needs to focus on lowering new Covid-19 cases and hospitalisations while boosting vaccinations, the chief White House medical adviser said.
“It’s just too soon to tell,” Dr Fauci told host Margaret Brennan on Face the Nation on CBS News when she asked if Americans can gather for Christmas 2021.
“We’ve just got to keep concentrating on continuing to get those numbers down and not try to jump ahead by weeks or months and say what we’re going to do at a particular time,” Dr Fauci said.
“Let’s focus like a laser on continuing to get those cases down. And we can do it by people getting vaccinated and also, in the situation where boosters are appropriate, to get people boosted, because we know that they can help greatly in diminishing infection and diminishing advanced disease, the kinds of data that are now accumulating in real time,” he added.
On Friday, US crossed the grim milestone of registering 700,000 Covid deaths. The country has so far reported more than 43.6 million confirmed Covid cases.
The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention has urged unvaccinated individuals to avoid traveling for the holidays and wear a mask if they attend indoor parties.
