Federal Scientists urge governors not to list restrictins: decline incases stall

WASHINGTON — Federal health officials warned impatient governors on Friday against relaxing pandemic control measures, saying that a recent steep drop in coronavirus cases and deaths in the United States may be leveling off at a very high number — a shift that the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said “must be taken extremely seriously.”

The pleas from the director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, and Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser for the virus, came as the Biden administration scrambled to stay ahead of a possible fourth surge of infections and the spread of worrisome variants, which officials say account for a rising percentage of cases in the country.

Those calls punctuated a fast-paced day of pandemic-related developments around the country. Mr. Biden flew to Houston to showcase the government’s latest mass vaccination site. The Food and Drug Administration neared emergency authorization of a third coronavirus vaccine, this one from Johnson & Johnson. And the White House enlisted business groups to help vaccinate their employees and reach Americans resisting vaccinations.

Behind it all were ominous signs after weeks of positive developments.

“Things are tenuous,” Dr. Walensky said at a White House briefing on the pandemic. “Now is not the time to relax restrictions.”

According to a New York Times database, virus cases across the United States appear to be leveling off from the steep decline that began in January, with figures comparable with those reported in late October. The seven-day average of new cases was 69,450 as of Thursday.

Cases have slightly increased week over week in recent days, though severe weather limited testing and reporting in Texas and other states the previous week, and not all states reported complete data on the Presidents’ Day holiday. Still, the overall numbers remain horrific: More than half a million Americans are now dead of Covid-19, and as of Friday, more than 28 million have been infected.

Yet governors were chafing against coronavirus-related restrictions and itching to take steps to restore a sense of normalcy. In a sign that the partisan divide over the pandemic has not yet abated, Republicans seemed more eager to roll back virus control measures than Democrats, though in New York, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat, has also been easing restrictions on a variety of activities. ...