President Joe Biden’s coronavirus response team reminded Americans on Monday that the goal of the administration is not to reopen, even as more people are vaccinated for the Chinese virus.
“The goal is not to sort of open up travel, open up all of, you know, things, because people — you know, we’re scaling up vaccination,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky said during a White House coronavirus response briefing.
More than 75.2 million doses have been administered in the United States at a rate of 1.74 million doses per day, according to the Bloomberg vaccination tracker.
Walensky and other medical officials answered questions from reporters during the briefing about releasing updated guidance for vaccinated individuals in the United States.
“The goal of this first 100 days has been — make sure that we are in a place to be out of this pandemic,” she said, noting that there were still 70,000 new coronavirus cases per day. “We’re not in that place right now. … We’re not out of the woods just yet.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said small family gatherings at home without masks could be permitted if all members visiting each other were vaccinated.
But he warned vaccinated Americans attempting to reenter society.
Small family gatherings of vaccinated individuals, he said, were “very different when you step out the door and go into a society that has 70,000 new infections per day.”
“So Amen to what Dr. Walensky just said,” Fauci concluded.
Walensky and Fauci said the CDC is working on guidance for vaccinated Americans but did not set a timetable for the new advisory.
Walensky expressed concerns that governors in some states were lifting coronavirus restrictions that began a year ago.
“I remain deeply concerned about a potential shift in the trajectory of the pandemic,” she said, adding that she was “really worried about reports that more states are rolling back the exact public health measures we have recommended to protect people from COVID-19.”
Watch the briefing:
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