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Covid-19 could kill as many Americans this winter as the Germans and Japanese did in World War II, a research team the Trump administration relied on on Friday warned.
The U.S. death toll, currently 244,250, could nearly double by March 1 to 438,971, the School of Medicine’s Institute for Health Measurement and Evaluation (IMHE) said. from the University of Washington in its latest screening.
Add Europe, which is in the middle of a second wave of infections, and the rest of the world, and the global death toll could reach 2.8 million by March 1, IMHE has projected. .
“When you see that Europe already kills more than 4,000 per day, and that it continues to grow. We are on a similar trajectory, ”Dr. Christopher Murray, professor of health sciences at the University of Washington and director of the IHME, told NBC News. “We’re barely four weeks late.”
In other coronavirus news:
- With President Donald Trump still refusing to concede the election, President-elect Joe Biden’s team is hatching its own plan to mass distribute a potential Pfizer vaccine against Covid-19.
- The White House and Capitol Hill are not close to forging a new Covid-19 relief plan. And even if a deal is struck, it will be too late to save some 100,000 small businesses.
- New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has warned parents that soaring Covid-19 rates in the city could force him to shut down the nation’s largest public school system as early as Monday. “It’s not something that no parent wants to have to deal with, but we need to prepare and parents should have a plan for the rest of November,” de Blasio told WNYC radio.
- New Jersey was chosen by the federal Department of Health to be one of the first states to receive a new rapid Covid-19 test that has been shown to produce results with 99% accuracy in about 20 minutes.
- Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito said the pandemic “has resulted in previously unimaginable restrictions on individual liberty.” But in his speech to the conservative Federalist Society, Alito also said he was “not decreasing the severity of the virus’ threat to public health” or saying nothing about “whether any of these restrictions represent good public policy “.
- Puerto Rico Governor Wanda Vázquez said she would activate the National Guard to help enforce a curfew aimed at curbing the increase in Covid-19 cases. It is also once again closing the beaches to everyone except those who exercise.
Coronavirus deaths in the United States had slowed from the rate of new infections in the summer and fall, but Murray said he expects that to change in the coming months.
“Eventually, deaths occur,” he says. “We see the transmission first in young people, then it spreads to the elderly and people with co-morbidities. There is a natural lag, which means that deaths don’t start to accelerate at the same rate, but then they do. “
January in the United States could be particularly bleak, IMHE predicted, echoing warnings from Dr.Anthony Fauci and other leading U.S. infectious disease experts who have repeatedly urged Americans to hide and go be more vigilant on social distance as the end of year holidays approach.
The daily death rate from Covid-19, which rose to 910 last week, could reach 2,200 per week by the middle of this month, according to IMHE.
Murray said the IHME’s projection of more than 438,000 deaths by March could rise further if Americans are not diligent in wearing masks, exercising social distancing and avoiding large gatherings.
“It depends on what we do as citizens and what state governments are doing,” Murray said. “Our numbers are what we think will happen, but they can definitely be worse.”
The United States led the world on Friday with more than 10.5 million cases and a record number of new infections were reported every day, while the Pfizer vaccine is still months away from distribution.
IMHE estimates that about 12% of the US population has already been infected, ranging from 1% of the population of Vermont to 24% of New Jersey.
Meanwhile, the daily death rate is over four per million in Arkansas, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska , New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, Tennessee, Wisconsin and Wyoming, reported IMHE.
The terrible IMHE projections were released as President Donald Trump had less than 10 weeks in office and was concerned about overturning the results of an election Joe Biden appears to have won and not focusing on the acceleration of the Covid-19 crisis.
The IMHE was criticized in the early days of the pandemic for providing overly optimistic projections that turned out to be wrong, but which Trump and his team nonetheless presented as proof that they had the spread of the coronavirus under control.
But in September, IMHE published a “best case scenario” that predicted 257,286 to 327,775 deaths from Covid-19 by the end of the year.
Meanwhile, New York City reported 5,401 new cases of Covid-19 overnight, the highest daily number since spring, when the Empire State was the nation’s pandemic hotspot. The state is imposing new restrictions on restaurants, gyms and family reunions that were due to go into effect Friday night.
“We are in the middle of a sea of COVID rising around us,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo said.
A dozen states broke their one-day records for new cases on Thursday, according to data from NBC News. These were Colorado (5,197), Illinois (12,702), Indiana (6,591), Minnesota (7,225), New Hampshire (322), New Mexico (1742) , North Dakota (1801), Ohio (7,101), South Dakota (2020), Utah (3,919), Vermont (116) and Wisconsin (8,223).
Puerto Rico also set a new daily high for infections with 2,118, the data showed.
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