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US coronavirus: January has been the deadliest month for Covid-19 with nearly 80,000 lives lost so far in the US

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As of Tuesday, there have been more than 79,000 coronavirus fatalities, topping the previous record set in December by more than a thousand, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

The grim milestone underpins the growing demand from state officials for more vaccines so that Americans can be inoculated more quickly.

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden’s Covid coordinator Jeff Zients informed governors that allocations would increase by around 16% starting next week, according to a source with knowledge of the call.

Biden has pushed for 100 million vaccination shots in the first 100 days of his presidency, but with a long road ahead for vaccinations, he also called for 100 days of mask-wearing.

“The brutal truth is it’s going to take months before we can get the majority of Americans vaccinated. Months. In the next few months, masks, not vaccines, are the best defense against Covid-19,” Biden said while announcing the federal government would buy and distribute more vaccine doses from Moderna and Pfizer.

With those additional doses, Biden said there would be enough to fully vaccinate 300 million Americans — nearly the entire US population — by the end of summer or early fall.

Supply of vaccines not meeting demand

Struggling after the stress of nearly a year of responding to the pandemic, states are eager to administer vaccines quickly and attempt a return to life as normal.

“We have to defeat it because Mississippians are done. We’re done burying loved ones who were lost to this virus. We’re done with stressed hospitals. We’re done with the fearful talk of lockdowns and shutdowns. We’re ready for community again,” said Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves, who announced that the state celebrated about 200,000 vaccines delivered.

The director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention said he was “very encouraged” by the new presidential administration’s approach to vaccinations, but that the state is still struggling with the dearth of vaccines.

“We know that right now the number of individuals who want to be vaccinated greatly outstrips the supply of vaccine that we have available,” Dr. Nirav Shah said.

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis said his conversations with the Biden administration have made him feel hopeful about the future of vaccine distribution, but that “we cannot yet count on additional supply yet.”

Even if the administration delivers on the 16% increase in allocations promised, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace that it won’t be enough.

“We’re functionally out, we start to get a new allocation over the next few days,” Cuomo said.

Variants stoke demand and fears

Adding to public fears is the spread of variants of the coronavirus.

On Tuesday, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear announced that two cases of the variant first identified in the United Kingdom have been confirmed in the state.

The variant has been shown to spread especially quickly, according to CDC modeling. And a UK report released Friday states there is “a realistic possibility” that the new variant has a higher death rate than other variants.

The threat of variants has made reopening the state a greater concern in California, a recent epicenter of the pandemic in the US, Los Angeles County public health director Barbara Ferrer said.

“This would not be the time to think just because we are reopening that things are looking rosy,” she said noting that asymptomatic spread is a problem. “We do need to move through the next few weeks with caution. At many other points where we’ve been reopening our sectors, we in fact have seen a bump up in our cases we can’t really afford that.”

For his part, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla tried to calm fears around the variants with assurances that the groundwork is already being laid to fight them.

“We should not be frightened, but I think we need to be prepared,” Bourla said during the Bloomberg The Year Ahead event Tuesday. “Once we discover something that it is not as effective, we will very, very quickly produce a booster dose that will be a small variation to the current one.”

School reopening safety

Meanwhile, there was a glimmer of good news Tuesday for parents who are hoping to return their kids to school.

A report from the CDC said that with the right mitigation strategies, it’s possible to open K-12 schools for in-person learning with minimal Covid-19 transmission.

Those mitigation strategies include wearing masks, social distancing and limiting time in shared outdoor spaces, according to the study from the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

In Ohio, Gov. Mike DeWine said he aims to have anyone who works in a school receive their first vaccine dose in the month of February at the very least in hopes of sending all students back to school by March 1.

Currently, people older than 75 and those with certain medical conditions are able to receive vaccines. On February 1, those 70 and older and employees of K-12 schools will be eligible for the vaccine, he said during a press conference Tuesday.

Schools reopening have been a priority for many officials as students across the country have spent months learning remotely. But local leaders have approached the return in various ways.

Of the 20 largest school districts in the country, nine are currently all online, eight offer a choice of either full in-person or all online, two have a hybrid plan and one in Hawaii varies plans based on infection rates among different islands.

CNN’s Amanda Watts, Virginia Langmaid, Mj Lee, Sara Murray, Jamiel Lynch, Anna Sturla, Keith Allen, Mirna Alsharif, Taylor Romine, Elizabeth Cohen, Rebekah Riess, Stella Chan, Amanda Sealy, Jennifer Henderson and Lauren Mascarenhas contributed to this report.

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Fauci: Trump administration’s Covid strategy ‘very likely did’ cost lives

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Former President Donald Trump faced significant criticism over the final year of his presidency for his pandemic response, which strayed often from the guidance of his own administration’s health officials and veered often into bizarre territory.

From the pandemic’s early stages, Trump regularly downplayed the risk Covid-19 posed to Americans and predicted often that the U.S. would soon have the virus beat, even as cases spiked around the country. He resisted the best practices recommended by his own public health team, declining to wear a mask in public and holding large-scale rallies, both indoors and outdoors, with thousands of supporters.

Trump frequently touted the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for Covid-19 despite there being no evidence of it being effective. At one point last spring, he suggested Americans should inject themselves with disinfectants to combat the virus.

Fauci’s regular appearances at White House coronavirus briefings made him a household name throughout the pandemic, but his relationship with Trump quickly soured as the NIAID chief refused to fall in line with the then-president’s inconsistent and at-times dangerous Covid-19 rhetoric. Trump called Fauci an idiot and a “disaster,” saying “if we listened to him, we’d have 700,000 [or] 800,000 deaths.” Trump accused Fauci and other health officials of exaggerating the pandemic’s severity and criticized officials for saying early on that masks weren’t necessary.

As the pandemic wore on, Fauci’s appearances at the White House grew increasingly rare, as did contact between the two men.

Fauci said in a news conference with White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Thursday that his work with the Biden administration thus far has been “liberating.” Fauci has said the Trump administration prevented him from making some media appearances and that the White House hampered the flow of public health information.

“You didn’t feel you could actually say something and there wouldn’t be repercussions about it,” Fauci said in the news conference Thursday. “One of the new things in this administration, is if you don’t know the answer, don’t guess. Just say you don’t know the answer.”

Fauci said in an interview Thursday that there is “complete transparency” under the Biden administration.

On CNN Friday, he also said that there was a coronavirus strategy under the Trump administration, but that it “wasn’t articulated well.”

“The separation of the federal government and the states … was really a lesion,” Fauci said on CNN. “You don’t want the federal government to do everything and you don’t want the states to do everything. … What we saw a lot of was saying ‘OK states, do what you want to do.’ And states were doing things that clearly were not the right direction.”

Biden’s Covid-19 strategy has included directing FEMA to establish Covid-19 liaisons to “maximize cooperation between the federal government and the states” and reimbursing states for using the National Guard in relief efforts.

“The best thing to do is to have a plan, have the federal government interact with the states in a synergistic, collaborative, cooperative way, helping them with resources and helping them with a plan, at the same time respecting the individual issues that any individual state might have,” Fauci said.

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