NIH Director Collins: US could soon hit more than 200,000 new coronavirus cases per day – CNN

Early Monday morning in Asia, CNN came out with the news quoting comments from the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Director Dr. Francis Collins’ appearance on Fox News Sunday.

US Health authority said, “I will be surprised if we don't cross 200,000 cases a day in the next couple of weeks, and that's heartbreaking considering we never thought we would be back in that space again.”

"That was January, February, that shouldn't be August. But here we are with the Delta variant, which is so contagious, and this heartbreaking situation where 90 million people are still unvaccinated, who are sitting ducks for this virus, and that's the mess we're in,” added Collins.

Additional quotes

As of Saturday, the US has averaged about 129,000 daily new cases over the last 7 days, a number that has risen every day since July 5, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

The country last averaged over 200,000 cases per day in January, before the Covid-19 vaccines were widely available.

The rate of new hospitalizations among people in their 30s increased by nearly 300% over the past month, according to an analysis of data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

‘We are going to have to continue to get people vaccinated so that right now, even in states in which you have a good relative proportion of people vaccinated, you have to get the overwhelming proportion of people vaccinating,’ Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on CBS' Face the Nation’ on Sunday.

FX reactions

The news exerts additional downside pressure on the market’s risk appetite and underpins the US dollar’s safe-haven demand. That said, the US Dollar Index (DXY) consolidates the heaviest fall in eight weeks around 92.55.

Read: US dollar bulls looking for reversion of the drop