CDC: March and April are key to stopping another surge

The spike will be fueled by the B.1.1.7 variant, first spotted in the United Kingdom, and will come over the next six to 14 weeks, said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

“Four weeks ago, the B.1.1.7 variant made up about 1 to 4% of the virus that we were seeing in communities across the country. Today, it’s up to 30 to 40%,” Osterholm told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “What we’ve seen in Europe, when we hit that 50% mark, you see cases surge,” he said.

Walensky said she hopes local leaders will do what they can to encourage people to wear masks and keep good physical distance from each other — and advise people to get vaccinated.

Walensky also said the US health system is “frail.”

People gather Saturday on a beach in Miami.

“In the last 10 years, we have seen Ebola, we have seen Zika, we have seen H1N1, and now of course we’ve seen Covid-19,” she said. “We do need a massive bolstering of our public health infrastructure and public health workforce … We saw the manifestation of it being frail in what happened with Covid-19.”

Here’s what we know about the B.1.1.7 variant

While there are multiple variants of coronavirus circulating in the US, experts have been particularly concerned with the highly contagious B.1.1.7 variant’s dangerous potential.

Infectious diseases specialist and epidemiologist Dr. Celine Gounder told CNN on Sunday she was on an emergency meeting a group of experts held on Christmas Eve to discuss the variant.

“We’ve been tracking it very closely since then,” she said. “Where it has hit in the UK and now elsewhere in Europe, it has really been catastrophic. It has driven up rates of hospitalizations and deaths and it’s very difficult to control.”

“This is sort of like we’ve been running this really long marathon, and we’re 100 yards from the finish line and we sit down and we give up,” Gounder said. “We’re almost there, we just need to give ourselves a bit more time to get a larger proportion of the population covered with vaccines.”

‘This is not just about personal choice’

On Monday, Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon announced he is removing the statewide mask requirement and allowing restaurants, bars, theaters and gyms to resume normal operations starting March 16.

Gordon pointed to declining numbers of active cases and hospitalizations, as well as the state’s vaccine rollout, as reasons for the changes.

He urged citizens to “continue to take personal responsibility for their actions and stay diligent,” including by wearing masks indoors and observing requests by private businesses.

On Sunday, Reeves defended his decision, saying that trying to entirely rid the state of Covid-19 cases would be an unrealistic goal, and the numbers officials were concerned about had all decreased.

“We look much more closely from a data standpoint at hospitalizations, number of Mississippians in the ICU, number of Mississippians on ventilators … all of those numbers have plummeted in our state over the last two months,” he told CNN.

And even without mask mandates, the governor said he recommends and “strongly” encourages residents to wear masks.

Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, told ABC the responsible thing for states to do is to keep mask mandates in place.

“This is not just about personal choice, right, it’s like if I were to drink and get behind the wheel of a car, it’s not just a personal choice that I’d be putting my life at risk, I’d be putting other people’s lives at risk,” Jha said.

“When you wear a mask you’re not just protecting yourself, you’re protecting people around you,” he added.

Less than 10% of Americans fully vaccinated

More than 31.2 million have received two doses, the data shows. That’s roughly 9.4% of the US population.

That means more people in the United States have been fully vaccinated against Covid-19 than the 29 million confirmed coronavirus infections the country has seen so far during the pandemic, according to the latest data from the CDC.

But officials are hopeful vaccinations will continue ramping up in the coming months with the help of increased supply.

“We’ll have enough vaccines, I think we said for 300 million Americans,” Slavitt said Sunday. “There’s 250 million adults in the country right now, and right now, as we know, most teenagers are not eligible, and younger kids are not eligible, so it’s more than enough for every adult.”

Slavitt added that vaccines are now going from factories to arms “very, very quickly,” and that the country is getting more efficient at administering the doses.

On Monday, President Joe Biden and Veterans Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough toured the Washington DC VA Medical Center and watched veterans receive their vaccinations.

Biden said that the country is doing “pretty good” at distributing vaccines and said that while the country will reach 100 million doses of vaccine administered soon, officials still need to do a better job of reaching at-risk neighborhoods.

“It’s one thing to have efficiency, and we have to have equity as well,” Biden said.

Guidelines for fully vaccinated people

At the White House Covid-19 response team briefing, Walensky announced guidelines for safe activities by fully vaccinated people.

Her top points were that those people can:

— Visit other vaccinated people indoors without masks or physical distancing.

— Visit indoors with unvaccinated people from a single family without masks or physical distancing, if the unvaccinated people are at low risk for severe disease.

— Skip quarantine and testing if exposed to someone who has Covid-19 but are asymptomatic (but should monitor for symptoms for 14 days).