| The number of Americans testing positive for the coronavirus has dropped substantially from early January, easing the strain on hospitals across the nation that faced danger over the winter holidays. But new and more transmissible strains of the coronavirus are circulating more widely across the world. The CDC estimates those strains will become dominant in the United States in the coming weeks. On Thursday, the CDC said it had identified the first two strains of the South African variant in South Carolina. “This is the calm before the real storm. I think the darkest days of the pandemic are just ahead of us,” said Michael Osterholm, who directs the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Prevention at the University of Minnesota. The federal government has distributed about 47 million doses of vaccine, and just more than half of those doses have been administered, according to federal data. |
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