The emergence of COVID-19 variants in the U.S. will make its reopening riskier, an infectious disease expert warned Wednesday, noting that the B.1.1.7 variant has caused more transmissions in countries with similar vaccination efforts to America's.  

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a more highly transmissible variant of SARS-CoV-2, B.1.1.7 has been detected in 12 U.S. states, indicating that the B.1.1.7 has the potential to increase the U.S. pandemic trajectory in the coming months.

As more Americans are vaccinated, the number of people going out is increasing as well. According to a poll from Axios-Ipsos published Tuesday, the numbers who have gone out to eat or visit friends and family are up 12 and 9 percentage points respectively compared to a month ago. 

Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said during an event hosted by Axios that his only hope is "the U.S. as a country will take this seriously and do whatever it can to limit transmission as other countries have done."

Considering the danger of virus variants, Osterholm described U.S. efforts to reopen schools as "frustrating" as recent guidelines allow maintaining three feet (0.91 meter) of social distance instead of six feet (1.82 meters). "We've never been more open as a country since the beginning of the pandemic. We don't seem to care, in the sense that we're opening up everything at local, state, and even federal levels," he said.

Other experts echoed as "what we're doing is essentially spreading the B.1.1.7 variant across the nation," said Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. 

"These variants are spreading pretty quickly across the country, that's the bad news, what Texas, Mississippi and other states are doing to relax and get rid of the mask orders and kind of act like everything is back to normal, that is definitely coming down on the side of the variants." said Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health.