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With COVID burgeoning infections in the United States and Thanksgiving celebrations should have given the choralnavirus more opportunities to spread, experts fear the country will soon see a record number of deaths from the disease – the equivalent of the 2,977 people killed every day on September 11 – by Christmas.
In the last week alone, 10,288 people have died from COVID in the United States, with a current death toll of 267,302, according to the United States Centers for Disease Control website updated Tuesday. On average last week, 1,469 people died from COVID each day.
That’s below the record numbers reached in the spring, when the virus ravaged the northeast and the United States became the country with the highest number of deaths (a position it retains). End of April, COVID killed more than 2,000 Americans every day.
But after the country broke records for new cases and hospitalizations in November and some people rejected the CDC’s advice to celebrate Thanksgiving with people outside their homes, experts said. Newsweek they fear the spring highs for deaths will soon be passed.
They pointed out that COVID deaths are late for diagnoses by up to four weeks. The fact that a record 98,961 people were hospitalized with COVID Tuesday, according to COVID Tracking Project is not a good omen.
And those who keep a close eye on the data shouldn’t be lulled into a false sense of security by a sudden drop in deaths in the days after Thanksgiving, after they have risen steadily since mid-October, as the tweet of the COVID Follow-up project below.
As the number of current hospitalizations nears 100,000, daily deaths have started to rebound, following a decline after the holidays. We saw the same pattern after Labor Day. pic.twitter.com/yAPN8YHkKz
– The COVID monitoring project (@ COVID19Tracking) December 2, 2020
Dr. Georges C. Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, said Newsweek that regular notification of deaths would have been delayed over the holiday weekend. Similar to what was seen after Labor Day, the recorded deaths resurfaced in the following days.
A “dark” perspective
The CDC, which aggregates data from a number of models to create what is known as an ensemble forecast, sets its mid-range estimate for COVID deaths per day as of Dec. 19 at around 2,200, and its range above just over 3,000.
Jennifer Dowd, associate professor of demography and population health at the University of Oxford, said Newsweek she thinks the higher estimates are more realistic because the models don’t explicitly include people who meet during Thanksgiving. “The outlook is bleak,” she said.
“The virus grows precisely thanks to the type of social contact that Thanksgiving talks about: several households get together, eat and talk for a long time inside. durations without a mask, ”she said.
“The virus travels when people travel, so Thanksgiving can also bring the virus from higher prevalence areas to low prevalence areas and cause further outbreaks.”
Jagpreet Chhatwal, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School who works on The COVID-19 Prediction project of the simulator used for the CDC assembly, sees a similar path. He said Newsweek: “Sadly, we will most likely hit 3,000 deaths per day by the end of the year if we continue on the current path … it is only a matter of weeks that deaths per day will cross the previous peak observed in April. “
To fart Drobac, a doctor and specialist in infectious diseases and public health at Said Business School at the University of Oxford, UK, compared the devastation to that of the September 11 attacks, when 2,977 were killed. “We may be experiencing September 11 a day at Christmas,” he said. Newsweek.
Lauren Ancel Meyers, professor at the University of Texas at Austin (UT) and director of UT COVID-19 Modeling Consortium, also used by the CDC, said Newsweek his team projects between 1,500 and more than 3,000 people will die COVID-19 each day, but said the number could be “even higher” if Thanksgiving causes a spike in transmissions.
Jeffrey Shaman, professor of environmental health sciences who is also working on a COVID model used by the CDC, says Newsweek his team does not project 3,000 deaths per day, “but it is not out of the realm of possibility.”
Dowd cautioned that there are a few compensating forces that make it difficult to predict death rates, including the greater number of young people, who are less likely to die COVID, catch the coronavirus compared to the start of the pandemic.
“But since the current number of hospitalizations is so high, it suggests that the surge in infections has also spread to more vulnerable groups,” she said. “There is no evidence that COVID-19 itself has become less deadly, and there are no truly revolutionary treatments, although we have improved in dealing with critical cases. So, unless people are hospitalized with much less severe illness than in the spring, this surge in hospitalization will lead to a continued increase in deaths with a delay of a few weeks. “
When asked if upcoming celebrations like Christmas would make matters worse if people were celebrating indoors, experts said yes. But by following public health measures, such as wearing masks in the presence of others, frequent hand washing and keeping six feet from people outside the home, they said it was possible to ‘avoid more deaths.
“Christmas is about to create similar dilemmas and a potential family sprawl events [to Thanksgiving],” said Dowd. “The virus is cruel when it thrives in the situations we dream of – being together with loved ones. But now is the time to invest in future vacations, create new traditions, and take courage in the real promise of the vaccine cavalry on the horizon.
“We can save the New Year if we reduce physical contact and ensure that current infections are a dead end for the virus,” Dowd said.
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