WASHINGTON — The Biden administration is collaborating with business groups to encourage employers to join the fight against the coronavirus.
“Today, the administration is announcing a new partnership with America’s leading business organizations to enlist the full force of the private sector to defeat COVID-19 with a call to action,” said Andy Slavitt, White House senior advisor for COVID-19 response, at a task force briefing with reporters Friday morning. “The Biden administration is joining with the Chamber of Commerce; leaders of the Black, Latino, and Asian business communities; the National Association of Manufacturers; and the Business Roundtable to call on businesses big and small to promote three critical efforts.”
Those efforts include: requiring masking and social distancing to protect workers and customers; reducing barriers to employee vaccination, such as by providing workers with incentives like paid time off to get vaccinated; and using company products, properties, and websites to amplify CDC messages about the benefits of masking and vaccinations.
Although the trade groups can’t require members to cooperate, they promised to provide step-by-step resources to help businesses operate safely during the pandemic. Slavitt said the administration and the business groups “hope to reach hundreds of thousands of businesses representing over 100 million people.”
Slavitt also listed some actions already being taken by individual businesses: Ford and The Gap are producing and donating millions of masks, while sports industry organizations are offering stadiums and other venues to use as mass vaccination sites. Best Buy, Target, and Dollar General are giving employees paid time off or compensating them to get their coronavirus vaccinations, he said, and Uber and Lyft are giving free or discounted rides to vaccination sites.
Keeping our Foot on the Gas
Reporters also heard from CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, MD, who reported data suggesting that declines in COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths “may be stalling, potentially leveling off at still a very high number.”
“The most recent 7-day average of cases — about 66,350 — is higher than the average I shared with you Wednesday,” she said. “In fact, cases have been increasing for the past 3 days compared to the prior week … Cases, hospital admissions, and deaths all remain very high, and the recent shift in the pandemic must be taken extremely seriously.”
Some of these data may reflect the effect of new variants of the virus, she added, referring to new research about emerging variants in New York and California. “We may be done with the virus, but clearly the virus is not done with us,” said Walensky. “We cannot get comfortable or give in to a false sense of security that the worst of the pandemic is behind us — not now, not when mass vaccination is so very close … Together, we have the capacity to avoid another surge.”
Also at Friday’s briefing, Anthony Fauci, MD, the president’s chief medical advisor and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, discussed a phase I trial that his institute was beginning with Moderna to look at a “booster” COVID-19 vaccine to address the so-called B.1.351 variant thought to have originated in South Africa. The trial will include two groups: volunteers in Seattle and Atlanta who were vaccinated a year ago in the phase I trial of the Moderna vaccine; and volunteers in Seattle, Atlanta, Cincinnati, and Nashville who are not vaccinated and were not previously infected.
In response to a question about the recent lifting of restaurant capacity restrictions in Massachusetts, Fauci and other task force members cautioned against trying to get back to normal too quickly. “We understand there is a tendency, given that the direction of the curve is down, to get back to a situation where you’re approaching normal, but we have to be careful and take a look at that curve,” said Fauci. “If we plateau at 70,000, we’re at that very precarious position that we were in right before the fall surge, where anything that could perturb that could give us another surge … so we have to carefully look at what happens over the next week or so with those numbers. Watch it closely and be prepared to react according to what actually happens.”
“The president has asked for 100 days where we all do our part as a country to stop the spread of the virus while we are vaccinating the country,” said Slavitt. “And if we do that successfully, we’ll be able to open schools and businesses safely, and keep them open. If we do what we’ve been doing over the last year, which is at any sign of what appears to be progress, we relax our restrictions, we’ve seen what happens.”
He said the president speaks with governors or their staffs daily, and “we think it’s a mistake to take our foot off the gas too early, especially when we are accelerating our vaccination efforts right now.”
Source: MedicalNewsToday.com
