White House COVID-19 response adviser Dr. Ashish Jha reiterated his warning on Wednesday that if Congress fails to pass more pandemic funding, the result could be an unnecessary loss of life in the fall and winter flu season, CNBC reported.
Jha told reporters in a White House press briefing that a bottleneck in funding for tests has led to the country ''clearly undercounting cases.''
''There's a lot of infections across America,'' Jha said, adding that he supports getting President Joe Biden's $22.5 billion COVID funding request to Congress as soon as possible.
But he warned that ''we have to plan for a scenario where we don't get any more resources from Congress. I think it would be terrible. I think we would see a lot of unnecessary loss if that were to happen.''
The health official also warned that test manufacturers are already laying off workers and shutting down production lines due to a drop in demand and federal government subsidies.
At the same briefing, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the White House's chief medical adviser,
said most of the rising cases result from new omicron subvariants, waning immunity, and the relaxation of COVID restrictions, according to Spectrum News NY1.
Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, followed up Fauci's comments by urging leaders in high-spread communities to encourage wearing a mask both indoors and outdoors.
''We've always said put your mask aside when infection rates are low and pick it up again when infection rates are higher,'' Walensky said.
The CDC director emphasized that COVID cases have steadily risen over the past five weeks, with the seven-day rolling average of cases rising 26% from the previous week to 94,000 cases per day — that's up threefold from last month, according to Reuters.
In addition, Walensky said the seven-day average for hospitalizations was up 19% to around 3,000 per day, and the average number of deaths was 275 per day.
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