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With COVID-19 deaths inching upwards, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, MD, her voice shaking, warned of "impending doom" if states continue to relax restrictions, and if Americans continue to increase travel and ignore public health precautions.

Walensky began her usual COVID-19 status update, looking bored, even annoyed as she repeated her oft-used phrase, "concerning trends in the data."

But her face grew serious as she spoke of the country surpassing 30 million COVID cases since the pandemic began; of a 10% increase in the 7-day average of COVID-19 cases over the past week, to slightly below 60,000 cases; and of an uptick in hospitalizations, from a 7-day average of around 4,600 per day to around 4,800 per day.

"And deaths, which typically lag behind cases and hospitalizations, have now started to rise," she said, pointing to a nearly 3% increase to a 7-day average of "approximately 1,000 deaths per day."

At the start of her tenure, Walensky said she had pledged to always tell the truth even if it wasn't something Americans wanted to hear.

"I'm going to pause here," she said, and her voice began to shake.

"I'm going to lose the script and I'm going to reflect on the recurring feeling I have of impending doom," said Walensky, her eyes growing wider and starting to shine.

"We have so much to look forward to, so much promise and potential of where we are, and so much reason for hope. But right now I'm scared," she said.

"I know what it's like as a physician to stand in that patient room, gowned, gloved, masked, shielded and to be the last person to touch someone else's loved one because their loved one couldn't be there," she recalled of her time caring for COVID patients.

"I know what it's like when you're the physician, when you're the healthcare provider, and you're worried that you don't have the resources to care for the patients in front of you," she said.

She also recalled "that feeling of nausea, when you read the 'Crisis Standards of Care' and you wonder whether there are going to be enough ventilators to go around and who's going to make that choice."

Looking directly into the camera, she stressed that she was speaking "not only as your CDC director, but as a wife, as a mother, as a daughter, to ask you to just please hold on a little while longer."

She sympathized, she said, with those "wanting to be done" with the pandemic.

"We are just almost there, but not quite yet. And so I'm asking you to just hold on a little longer, to get vaccinated when you can. So that all of those people that we all love will still be here when this pandemic ends."

As she had done in previous briefings, Walensky cautioned that the U.S.'s pandemic trajectory "looks similar" to that of European countries a few weeks earlier, including Germany, Italy, and France -- countries now seeing "a consistent and worrying spike in cases," she said.

"We are not powerless. We can change this trajectory of the pandemic," she said.

"But it will take all of us recommitting to following the public health prevention strategies consistently while we work to get the American public vaccinated."

She urged elected officials, faith-based, community leaders and "other influencers" to "sound the alarm" noting that inaction isn't an option.

"For the health of our country, we must work together now to prevent a fourth surge."

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