The head of the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) pleaded with people in the US to wear masks and stick with Covid-19 mitigation measures, warning of "impending doom" as cases, hospital admissions and deaths begin to rise again.
Dr Rochelle Walensky, speaking at a press briefing on Monday, fought back tears as she outlined a series of warning signs and said she was frightened about a looming fourth wave of Covid-19 cases.
The seven-day average for new daily Covid-19 cases is now almost at 60,000, up 10 per cent from the previous week.
Hospital admissions are also up to about 4,800 a day from 4,600 a week earlier.
Deaths, a lagging indicator, have also started to rise again, she said.
“I’m going to reflect on the recurring feeling I have of impending doom. We have so much to look forward to, so much promise and potential of where we are and so much reason for hope, but right now I’m scared,” she said.
“What we’ve seen over the last week or so is a steady rise in cases. We’re now in the 60,000 to 70,000 range.
“When we see that uptick in cases, what we’ve seen before is that things really have a tendency to surge and surge big.”
She said the US trajectory looked similar to that in the EU a few weeks ago, before spikes in cases took hold. She asked elected officials, faith leaders and other influencers for help.
“I’m calling on every single one of you to sound the alarm, to carry these messages into your communities,” she said.
“We do not have the luxury of inaction. For the health of our country, we must work together now to prevent a fourth surge,” she said.
Many states are lifting restrictions at levels the agency would not recommend, Dr Walensky said.
She will speak to governors on Tuesday and warn them against reopening too quickly. She also cited an increase in travel as potentially fuelling a rise in cases.
Dr Walensky has regularly sounded the alarm as a decline in cases stalled from January highs. Her plea on Monday was her strongest yet.
The US is racing to vaccinate adults as new variants of the virus take hold and spread, hoping that inoculations will rise before a new wave kills tens of thousands more.
Dr Walensky said she was speaking “not only as your CDC director, but as a wife, as a mother, as a daughter, to ask you to just, please, hold on a little while longer".
"I so badly want to be done, I know you all so badly want to be done. We are just almost there but not quite yet,” she said.
“So, I’m asking you to just hold on a little longer, to get vaccinated when you can, so that all of those people that we all love will still be here when this pandemic ends.”
Cases steadily decreased from early January through mid-February before stalling, falling again, stalling again and then starting to rise.
About 51 million people in the US have received both doses of the vaccine. A person is considered fully vaccinated about two weeks after they receive their final dose.
