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More Americans are now receiving the coronavirus vaccine, but confirmed cases and deaths from the disease are horribly shattering records almost every day, both in the country and in the hot zone of California.
Saved more than many countries around the world, the Golden State today reached a new unprecedented death record with 379 lives lost to Covid-19.
Faced with the dire situation of almost no intensive care beds available in much of the state, the California Department of Public Health also reported 52,281 new cases on Thursday. In the past two days, new cases have jumped to around 20,000 Wednesday and Thursday from December 15 in California.
Still in a glimmer of hope, the 52,281 cases identified today are not the all-time record.
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This dubious distinction goes to the 53,711 reported Wednesday. However, with the difference of just under 1,500 between December 16 and today, it’s also worth noting that backlog accounting which usually contributes to big numbers like what we’ve seen these two past few days isn’t much of a factor for Thursday’s numbers – unfortunately.
That number of new cases from Dec. 16 is the highest any state union has had in a single day of the year. Texas had 58,000 as of December 11, but that turned out to be a data anomaly and not in fact an indication of the true infection status of Lone Star State.
As it stands, if it were a sovereign nation, the state of California would be the third most infected country in the world. It would be after America and Brazil and before the UK and India – all of which are sagging under the disease.
California’s previous death record was just yesterday with 293 deaths released by Covid-19 on the state’s Covid-19 online dashboard. As perhaps the deadliest indication of how serious things are, the past week saw a horrific trio of all-time death nights. Comparatively, today’s deaths are up 1.8% from Wednesday, a statistic that has a lot of faces, names and families behind it.
Witnessing the fallout from increasingly clear Thanksgiving trips and gatherings, California’s current semi-stay-at-home orders and restrictions appear to be on the way to an 18-wheeler as the numbers climb and climb. In incredibly hard-hit Los Angeles, county officials and Congressman Adam Schiff both have virtual town halls scheduled for tonight to deal with the crisis and answer questions from the public.
There will undoubtedly be a lot of questions.
In the Southern California region, which includes the City of Angels and San Diego, intensive care unit capacity fell to just 0.5% on December 16.
“There is light at the end of the tunnel, but we are still in the tunnel,” Newsom said on December 15. “And that means we are going through perhaps the most intense and urgent time since the start of this pandemic. “
In the midst of all this tragedy and death, that “light” is the increasingly widely distributed Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine. Designating frontline health workers as the first to get vaccinated, California aims to receive 2.1 million doses of the vaccine by New Year’s Eve. With a population of nearly 40 million, that means a lot of californians are going to be waiting deep into 2021 for their photo, so to speak.
A meeting today might increase that a bit, or at least shed some light, to paraphrase the governor.
A second Covid-19 vaccine from Moderna is expected to be discussed by FDA officials on Thursday. If approved, and also approved by the CDC, 20 million more doses could be distributed to Americans by the end of 2020.
Across the country, the United States crossed a pandemic threshold on Wednesday as the weather turned even less hospitable and snowstorms hit the East Coast. There were 245,033 new cases of coronavirus yesterday and 3,611 deaths. That brings the US total to around 17.1 million cases and more than 308,000 deaths since February of this annus horribilis.
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