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NEW YORK (AP) – Americans celebrated a gloomy Christmas Eve Thursday as coronavirus infections erupted across the country, political leaders warned them not to travel or gather in large groups, and a highly contagious variant of the virus spread. even more so in Europe.
More than a million people have received the first of two doses of vaccine since Dec. 14, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But vaccines so far have had little effect on the latest surge. of cases across the country.
Achieving herd immunity to the virus could require vaccinating up to 90% of Americans, Dr. Anthony Fauci, America’s foremost infectious disease expert, told the New York Times in an interview.
“We really don’t know what the real number is. I think the real range is between 70 and 90%. But I am not going to say that 90%, ”Fauci said,
Fauci, who is advising both Republican President Donald Trump and President-elect Joe Biden, a Democrat, on the pandemic, acknowledged that he had revised his estimates upward since the beginning of the year, when he said the nation would achieve herd immunity by inoculating 60 % to 70% of the population.
Fauci was vaccinated earlier this week on live television.
The United States recorded more than 3,000 deaths for the second day in a row on Wednesday, according to a Reuters tally. The death toll in the United States since the pandemic broke out in March has exceeded 326,000.
The states of Tennessee and California have become the epicenters of the latest increase.
“Our state is ground zero for an increase in Covid-19 and we need Tennesseans by their side,” Tennessean Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, said in a tweet Wednesday. Lee asked residents of the southern state to wear masks and avoid large gatherings during the holidays.
Mutant variant spreads in Europe
Tennessee has had 119 new cases for every 100,000 people over the past seven days, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control.
California, the nation’s most populous state, ranked second with 105 cases per 100,000 residents. Rhode Island and Arizona have also experienced recent spikes.
State and local political leaders across the country have urged Americans not to travel during the holidays, saying that Thanksgiving celebrations had further spread the virus.
Many Americans, tired after more than nine months of lockdowns, have defied those warnings.
More passengers flew commercial flights on Wednesday than any other day in the pandemic, with 1,191,123 passengers passing through airport checkpoints, according to data from the U.S. Transportation Security Administration.
That number represents a drop from 2019, when 1,937,235 flew on December 23.
Healthcare workers, nursing home residents, elected officials and firefighters are among the first to get vaccinated. Most Americans have been told that it could take six months or more before they are eligible for vaccines.
Political leaders have been criticized on both sides of the ideological spectrum for taking the line.
While vaccination programs give Americans reason to hope that pandemic control is in the offing, an even more communicable variant has spread rapidly in the UK.
The mutant variant was found in Germany for the first time, the German state of Baden-Wuerttemberg said on Thursday.
The United States, unlike many nations around the world, has not banned travelers from Britain, but the governors of New York and Washington state have ordered travelers from the United Kingdom to self-quarantine upon arrival. .
New York, one of the first epicenters of the pandemic, has recorded more than 36,000 deaths from Covid, far more than any other state.
