Dropping Numbers

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Anchor lead: Should we be relaxing our guard now that Covid-19 numbers are dropping? Elizabeth Tracey reports

Covid-19 numbers are dropping, and that’s good news. Not so good is the rise of worrisome variants worldwide, which could stall or reverse this trend. Brian Garibaldi, a critical care medicine expert at Johns Hopkins, says infection rates are what keeps him up at night.

Garibaldi: I’m much more worried about just the level of infection we have in this country. We should be very happy that we’re at the best we’ve been since Halloween but you have to keep that in the context of oh my gosh we were up to almost 300,000 cases a day. We should be celebrating that improvement, but its still a lot of cases a day, and viruses mutate, so the more opportunities it has to mutate the more opportunities additional variants will pop up. These variants are popping up all the time, that doesn’t mean that they’re going to be more transmissible or more deadly, but just by chance there could be some that will acquire those characteristics.  :34

Garibaldi reminds everyone to keep up the good work with masks and distancing. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.