American coronavirus: Nation experiences deadliest five days since start of Covid-19 pandemic in past two weeks

The country’s total death toll from Covid-19 has now risen to more than 365,200, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. And nearly 115,000 more people could lose their lives over the next four weeks, according to projections by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.

Arizona’s senior health official said Thursday that “coming out of the Christmas holidays” the state’s Covid-19 numbers are on the rise.

And although vaccinations now take several weeks, it will be months before they are widespread enough to have a significant impact on the course of the pandemic, experts have warned.

Health officials say they are ‘surprised’ about vaccine rollout

The vaccine rollout will take a few weeks to catch up, Dr Anthony Fauci said Thursday, and if that does not happen, changes will need to be made.

“I think it would be fair to watch what happens in the next few weeks,” he told NPR. “If we don’t catch up with the original goal, we really need to make changes to what we’re doing.”

“We just need to leave a little slack – not a lot – but enough to say, well, we’re past the holiday season, now let’s really turn on the afterburners,” he added.

“We have been over-promised and under-delivered as a nation,” said Dr Steven Stack, commissioner of the Kentucky Department of Public Health, in a briefing Thursday sponsored by the Association of Human Health Officials. States and territories. “We only got a third of what we thought we were going to get based on the initial modeling.”

“If we had just projected realistic amounts, the public wouldn’t have seen this as a shortcoming – we would have recognized it for the incredible accomplishment it was to have even so many vaccines so quickly,” Stack said.

Other health leaders have said states need more money and more staff to be able to administer the vaccines quickly enough.

Pennsylvania Health Secretary Dr Rachel Levine said states, cities and territories had received just $ 340 million to build the infrastructure needed to deploy vaccines until the end of the year. ‘year.

“It’s clearly insufficient to accomplish what we’re trying to accomplish,” Levine said.

The money will be “critical to many aspects of our response,” Levine added, including contracting with companies to run community vaccination clinics.

New studies offer more information on Covid-19 transmission

Meanwhile, new findings are now shedding light on how the virus is transmitted.

A team of researchers has found that more than half of Covid-19 cases may have been transmitted by people without symptoms. It’s a model – not a real-life study – but based on data from eight studies in China, about 59% of all transmissions were from people without symptoms, the researchers said.

“In a range of plausible scenarios, at least 50% of transmission has been estimated to have occurred from people without symptoms,” the team wrote in the journal JAMA Network Open.

In the three weeks after colleges or universities opened for in-person teaching, the counties that housed these institutions “saw a 56% increase in incidence,” wrote CDC-led researchers in the weekly agency report.

Meanwhile, the incidence fell to 5.9% in counties without major universities and to 17.9% in those with universities that held distance learning courses, they found.

Throughout the pandemic, many universities have struggled in their response to the virus, with some choosing to start the fall semester with in-person classes and convert remotely after an increase in infections, while others have tried to control the spread of the virus by banning events like parties and student gatherings.

In Arkansas, fraternity and sorority gatherings and activities were linked to hundreds of cases of Covid-19 at a university, according to a new report.

The study, published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, described more than 960 confirmed and probable cases at an anonymous state university, 97% of which were in people aged 18 to 24.

Researchers from the state’s health department and CDC said 54 gatherings were linked to cases at the university and more than 90% of those events involved sororities and fraternities.