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Millions of Americans are traveling and gathering for the Thanksgiving holiday, despite urgent and urgent warnings from American doctors, nurses, health officials and hospitals not to do so.
The trip raises the possibility of a “surge superimposed on a surge,” in the words of Dr Anthony Fauci, the country’s leading infectious disease specialist, and a wave of deaths as Christmas approaches.
“There is so much community transmission all over the United States that the chances that you will meet someone who has Covid-19 are actually very, very high, whether on a plane, at the airport or in an area. of rest, ”said Dr Syra Madad, infectious disease epidemiologist for New York hospitals.
Nearly 12.5 million Americans have been diagnosed with Covid-19 and more than 258,000 have died, according to the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Tracker. Doctors and nurses have reported severe burnout, and some healthcare facilities have seen further staff shortages. States like North Dakota recently led the world in death rates from the disease.
Despite this, several recent surveys show that a significant minority of Americans have not changed Thanksgiving plans and intend to move forward with travel and gatherings.
A New York Times survey showed that more than a quarter of Americans still plan to dine with people outside their homes. An Axios-Ipsos poll found that 39% of Americans had not changed their travel plans at all, while 61% decided to limit gatherings to those only in their household, eat small dinners and avoid travel.
AAA, which is best known for its roadside assistance program, plans quarterly trips. The group found that most people were planning shorter trips by car this year, as opposed to trips across the country by train, plane or bus. Air transport is down 47.5% compared to 2019.
Stephen Browning, a retired executive from Tucson, Ariz., Will be traveling to Seattle for Thanksgiving with his sister. The celebration usually has up to 30 people. This year, only 10 are coming and everyone has been asked to take a coronavirus test. He does not intend to remove his mask to eat or drink during the flight.
“This is my first flight since December 2019, so, yes, I have some concerns,” Browning said. “But I think most airlines are now acting responsibly and applying masks on all flights.”
Thanksgiving season now comes amid recent good news about vaccine development, which some doctors and health officials hoped would prompt people to take precautions against the virus.
We are so close to an era with mass tests, therapies and several vaccines -> why risk getting infected and infecting others during the holidays? Delaying a few months makes perfect sense given the solutions in sight in the spring. We have been in this field for 10 months already.
– Teacher. Devi Sridhar (visdevisridhar) November 23, 2020
The outbreak and repeated public health warnings appear to have led to a cohort of ‘wait-and-see’ trips, which polls are likely to travel by car and could decide very late whether to cancel plans.
“The trend of wait-and-see travel continues to impact final travel decisions, particularly for the Thanksgiving vacation,” said Paula Twidale, senior vice president of AAA Travel. As a result, car trips are only expected to decline 4.3% this year.
In a microcosm of Americans’ potential travel plans, a survey by the mobility app Moovit found that 23% of people in the New York and New Jersey area would still travel ‘probably’, down from nearly six month a year. And this, despite recommendations from health officials to stay home and the region’s grave experience last spring, when more than 2,000 people died from Covid-19 every day.
Historical trends have shown that the “second wave” of respiratory viruses – usually in cooler weather in the fall – tends to be more severe than the initial outbreaks, experts said. It’s a story some Americans are about to repeat.
“This wave will surely be as bad as the first wave and could be twice as bad,” said Dr. Nicholas Christakis, professor at the Yale Institute for Network Science and recent author of Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We live.
“I’m very worried that we are just not doing the right things that we need to do as a nation, and it’s going to be bad, worse,” Christakis said in the Daily Podcast of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
In addition to people traveling for the Thanksgiving vacation, millions of students will also be returning home, as universities send potentially infected students back to their family members.
In an interview with Washington Post Live on Monday, Fauci said the whole country was in “a very steep escalation of cases.”
“When you do things that increase your risk [of spreading Covid-19] – the travel, the congregation settings, the masks – there’s a good chance you will see a surge superimposed on a surge, ”Fauci said.
A high degree of Covid-19 spread over the holidays could cause the United States to kill more than 300,000 this year, Fauci said, as the country draws closer to Christmas.
Ultimately, the extent of the spread over the holiday weekend will remain unknown for two weeks due to the coronavirus’ long incubation period. Deaths from infections contracted during Thanksgiving will follow further, as Covid-19 takes weeks to kill its victims.
Life “will get better and better as the months go by,” Fauci said, urging Americans to wait for vaccines to gather indoors without a mask.
“You want to stay in there, not to get infected, not to infect your loved ones, because there is help nearby,” he said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report
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