'US making progress against Covid, but not out of the woods yet'

Washington, Oct 4 : The US is making progress against the ongoing resurgence of the Covid-19 pandemic, but the country is not out of the woods yet, America's top infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci said.

"We certainly are turning the corner on this particular surge," Xinhua news agency quoted Fauci, also the medical advisor to the White House, as saying to the ABC News on Sunday.

"But we have experienced over now close to 20 months surges that go up and then come down, and then go back up again. The way to keep it down, to make that turnaround continue to go down, is to do what we mentioned: get people vaccinated," he added.

"When you have 70 million people in the country who are eligible to be vaccinated, who are not yet vaccinated, that's the danger zone right there.

"So it's within our capability to make sure that that turnaround that we're seeing, that very favourable and optimistic turnaround, continues to go down and doesn't do what we've seen multiple times before, where it goes down and then it comes back up," Fauci said.

The US has witnessed its first notable decline in Covid-19 metrics in more than three months, with coronavirus-related hospital admissions and average daily new cases dropping by more than 30 per cent over the last month, ABC News said in a report on Sunday.

According to latest The New York Times' update, the seven-day average of confirmed cases of the pandemic stood at 108,009 nationwide on Saturday, with its 14-day change striking a 27 per cent fall.

The Covid-19-related deaths were 1,882 on Saturday, with the 14-day change realising a 6 per cent decrease.

According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a total of 214,870,696 people have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine till date, making up 64.7 per cent of the country's entire population.

Meanwhile, the number of fully vaccinated people stood at 185,143,698, which accounted for 55.8 per cent of the total population.

The CDC added that total of 4,742,750 people, or 2.6 per cent of the fully vaccinated group, have received booster shots.

As of Monday morning, the US still continues to be the worst-hit country with the world's highest number of coronavirus cases and deaths at 43,682,974 and 701,169.