Keep masks on, NIH director pleads as Texas enters 1st weekend without statewide Covid-19 restrictions

As spring break travel picks up and states increasingly drop Covid-19 restrictions, Dr. Francis Collins, the National Institutes of Health director, is pleading with people to keep using masks regardless of prevailing rules.

"If there ever was a time to put on the mask, this is it," Collins told MSNBC's Ali Velshi on Saturday.
Collins' comments to MSNBC come as encouraging signs -- falling case counts, rising vaccinations -- converge with public health experts' concerns that more-transmissible variants are gaining ground.
Collins and other experts have said the share of the B.1.1.7 variant caught in surveillance testing is increasing and could cause a spike in cases within weeks.
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That variant's spread comes as states abandon social restrictions, including Maryland, which Friday lifted its capacity limits on businesses, and Oklahoma, whose governor announced this week he was ending restrictions on events.
Texas, meanwhile, has entered its first weekend since Gov. Greg Abbott removed a statewide mask mandate and limits to business capacities on Wednesday.
In Houston, a hospital leader told CNN that he's worried about how he's seen people respond.
"If you go outside the clubs, they are packed. I mean, people just congregating, no masks," Dr. Joseph Varon, chief of staff at United Memorial Medical Center in Houston, told CNN Saturday.
"I am sure we are going to have a surge" in cases, Varon said.
US air travel also is picking up as some colleges observe spring break. More than 1.3 million people were screened at airport checkpoints Friday -- the highest figure since March 15, 2020, the Transportation Security Administration said.
Childhood vaccinations see 'substantial' and 'historic' declines amid Covid-19 pandemic, CDC director warns
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Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber said his Florida community is seeing "too much spring break activity."
"We've got a problem with too many people coming here to let loose in ways that are just simply improper," he told CNN Saturday.
With Covid-19, the high number of visitors and coronavirus variants, he said, "it's almost a triple threat for my community, and we are concerned and it's very challenging."
Greater mobility is expected to play a factor in how many more people contract Covid-19 and die in the coming months, the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation said this week.
Accounting for variant spread in some locations and increasing vaccinations, the IHME projects daily death tallies to drop to 651 a day by May 1.
But if the country approaches pre-pandemic levels of mobility, daily deaths still would be above 1,200 by May 1, the IHME's model projects.
The country has averaged more than 1,380 Covid-19 deaths a day over the last week, well below a mid-January peak of around 3,400 but still above the highest levels of the summer, according to Johns Hopkins University data.
And the pandemic as a whole already has taken a devastating toll: More than 532,000 Covid-19 deaths in the United States, far more than the top estimate of 240,000 deaths that the former White House coronavirus task force gave when the pandemic started a year ago.
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