late spring, early spring, early summer what are you thinking? based on all the data we have right now and what the trends look like, i would not be surprised if we were lifting restrictions by spring. reporter: still, while cases continue to drop, new covid deaths, a lagging indicator, are climbing. a painful reminder of the devastation the pandemic continues to cause. on that final day, her father and her sister and i stood with her as she had her last breath. reporter: after beating cancer, 41-year-old jessica estep was left immunocompromised. the newly wed mother of two was fully vaccinated when she lost her battle with covid. her family now pleading with everyone to get the shot. think about others because you don t know who s standing beside you. and you don t want to give them the virus that could take a mother away from their children. reporter: unfortunately, that kind of pain is still being felt all across the country tonight.
soon. she says there s no magic number when it comes to vaccinations that would put an end to remediation efforts. it is something schools everywhere are wrestling with in all different ways. jake. thanks so much. joining us now to discuss, dr. sanjay gupta. sanjay, you heard former cdc director, dr. tom frieden say he s the most optimistic he s been since the pandemic started. do you share his optimism, or is it still too early to say that we re almost out of the woods? i think there s a lot of positive indicators here. i think there s a lot of people who share this optimism if you just look at the numbers. cases are coming down, hospitalizations starting to come down. a smaller percentage, but still coming down. deaths are still going up in this country. but we recognize that that is also a lagging indicator. but the thing, jake, is if you start to look at where we are as a country besides the cases,
unvaccinated americans. the deaths are a lagging cater, and there are encouraging signs. new infections are starting to decline. that may signal the worst is behind us. nationwide, the u.s. is averaging about 650,000 new cases of covid per day, a big number, but 17% drop over the past two weeks. joining me now with more, dr. perry wilson, associate professor at yale university school of medicine. hi, dr. wilson, great to see you. we have been here before, it looked like the worst was over, then came delta, then came omicron. what is your sense of where things are right now? i know, the sense of déjà vu is palpable. i appreciate that. i am one of the more optimistic people. we will see deaths increase because they re a lagging indicator. the fact that cases are coming down, and the startling in infectiousness, means that immunity has risen dramatically in the past four to six weeks.
right now as clearly the politics have shifted, there s exhaustion across the country, what data and metrics should state and local leaders be paying attention to when they re making these decisions? is it the positivity rate? you noted yours is down but still elevated from what people thought was a high point in 2020. is it vaccination rates? what metrics should people be keying on before they make these decisions? i think we need to put it altogether and see those trend lines for a significant period of time. i think we look at previous troughs, previous lows and times where we thought, okay, we re getting out of this and how long did it take to get back into it again? was it two weeks, three weeks, a month? we know that deaths are a lagging indicator and they are starting to go down a bit, but we still had nearly 2,500 deaths in this country just yesterday, i believe, was the number. i had a family come in, a couple grieving the death of their adult son that came in with chest pai
day. when is that going to come down? it will come down. and we know this because we know that deaths, the number of deaths is what we call a lagging indicator. that first we see cases rise and then hospitalizations and then deaths. and then it is going to be the other way around. so now we re seeing cases and hospitalizations drop, we ll going to see the daily death numbers drop too. but this is unfathomable. and it is unimaginable that we ve looking at 900,000 americans that have died and the hundreds of thousands of people that have died since vaccines have become available. the unvaccinated are 97 times more likely to die from covid compared to somebody who is vaccinated and boosted. so let s help to spread that message that vaccination is our best protection to covid-19. dr. lena went, we appreciate the perspective. thank you. now to this. why is the republican national committee describing the events