US could soon see 200,000 Covid cases a day again: NIH director warns

Covid-19 cases in the United States could soon return to 200,000 a day, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has warned.

As of Saturday, the US has averaged about 129,000 daily new cases over the last 7 days, but according to NIH director Dr. Francis Collins, that number could jump in the next couple of weeks to a level not seen since among the pandemic’s worst days in January and February.

“I will be surprised if we don’t cross 200,000 cases a day in the next couple of weeks, and that’s heartbreaking considering we never thought we would be back in that space again,” Collins said on Fox News Sunday.

Collins urged unvaccinated Americans to get their shots, calling them “sitting ducks” for a Delta variant that is spreading at a rapid pace and showing little sign of letting up.

“That was January, February, that shouldn’t be August. But here we are with the Delta variant, which is so contagious, and this heartbreaking situation where 90 million people are still unvaccinated, who are sitting ducks for this virus, and that’s the mess we’re in.”

“This is going very steeply upward with no signs of having peaked out,” he said.

He went on to say that the US could decide in the weeks to come whether to offer coronavirus booster shots to more Americans this fall.

On Sunday, the country’s health officials made clear they are preparing for the possibility that the time for boosters may come sooner than later.

“There is a concern that the vaccine may start to wane in its effectiveness,” Collins said. “And Delta is a nasty one for us to try to deal with. The combination of those two means we may need boosters, maybe beginning first with healthcare providers, as well as people in nursing homes, and then gradually moving forward” with others, such as older Americans.

Since the Delta variant only began to hit the US hard in July, the “next couple of weeks” of case data will help the US make a decision, he noted.