US Coronavirus: Country has ‘crying level’ of Covid-19 transmission, expert says as country adds nearly 4 million cases this month

by



[ad_1]

The country’s total Covid-19 death toll is now rapidly approaching 400,000 – that’s more than the number of Americans who died in World War I, Vietnam War and Korean War combined and almost as many of Americans who died in World War II.

And that’s far higher than the death toll from Covid-19 in any other country.

“The numbers are pretty dire,” Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, told CNN Sunday night.

Hotez estimates it’s closer to a million new infections a day.

“It’s a garish level of transmission across the United States and people are scared, people are upset,” Hotez added. “There is a tremendous amount of work to be done starting January 20th.”

What the latest CDC Covid-19 death projections mean and what you can do about it
Experts have warned that while vaccinations are underway, the country is still not out of the woods, with the new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warning on Sunday that there are “dark weeks to come”.

“As of mid-February, we predict half a million deaths in this country,” Dr. Rochelle Walensky told CBS’s “Face the Nation”.

“We still haven’t seen the ramifications of what happened from the vacation trip, the vacation gathering, in terms of the high rates of hospitalizations and deaths afterwards,” Walensky added.

Hospitals under ‘severe stress’ next month

More than 124,300 Americans are currently hospitalized with the virus nationwide, according to the COVID follow-up project. To put that into perspective, it’s more than double the country’s peak Covid-19 hospitalization in the spring, according to project data.
In its latest briefing, the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Measurement and Evaluation predicted that hospitals in many states “will experience severe stress over the next four weeks.”
LA County has over 1 million coronavirus cases

This is already the case in different regions of the country.

Los Angeles County – the epicenter of California’s Covid-19 crisis – has been grappling with a sharp spike in infections, hospitalizations and deaths for weeks. County health officials reported on Sunday that more than 7,400 people were still hospitalized with the virus – 23% of them in intensive care units.

Pennsylvania officials said late last week that more than 4,900 people had been hospitalized with Covid-19 – almost double the spring peak.

In Georgia, a hospital told CNN affiliate WSB that they were so full they had to treat patients in hallways and in ambulances.

“We are truly in the darkest days,” Dr. Deepak Aggarwal, of Northeast Georgia Medical Center, told the news channel.

Variant could mean high number of cases in spring

Meanwhile, several US states have now reported cases of a new variant of Covid-19 first detected in the UK.

The number of cases of this variant is likely to “double every week,” according to Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.

Contagious new variant of coronavirus could make pandemic worse, CDC warns

“In about five weeks, it’s going to start to take hold,” Gottlieb said in an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation”.

“The only safety net against this new variant is the fact that we will have a lot of infections by then, so there will be a lot of immunity in the population, and we will be vaccinating more people,” he said. he adds. “But that really changes the equation and I think what we’re looking for is a relentless attack from this virus, which is heading towards spring.”

“We could have consistently high infection levels in the spring until we finally have enough people vaccinated.”

And while the Covid-19 variants aren’t necessarily more deadly, they can still cause more deaths, Dr Anthony Fauci told NBC on Sunday.

“Even though on an individual basis it’s not more virulent, which means it doesn’t make you sicker or more likely to die, just by the numbers, the more cases you have, the more you go. to have hospitalizations, and the more hospitalizations you have, the more deaths you’re going to have, ”Fauci said.

12 million Americans received first dose of vaccine

Meanwhile, more than 12.2 million Americans have received their first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine and more than 31 million doses have been distributed across the country, according to the latest CDC data.
States put smokers online for Covid-19 vaccine, sparking frustration among lower priority
It’s like the country is just days away from the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden. Biden outlined a vaccination plan that includes opening up eligibility to more people, creating more vaccination sites, and taking action to increase vaccine supply and distribution.

“Our plan is as clear as it is bold: to get more people vaccinated for free. Create more places to get vaccinated. Mobilize more medical teams so that vaccines are vaccinated in people’s arms. Increase the supply and get it out as soon as possible. possible, ”Biden said last week.

Microsoft, Oracle, and other tech giants partner with Covid-19 vaccine 'passports'

And he also said he was “convinced” that his administration can meet his goal of delivering 100 million vaccines in his first 100 days in office. Fauci said he “firmly” believed it was doable.

“If we get about 70% to 85% of the people in the country vaccinated, we’ll probably come up with that collective immunity umbrella,” Fauci told NBC last week. “We can start to move closer to some form of normalcy, but that will really depend on the uptake of vaccines.”

CNN’s Lauren Mascarenhas and Jacqueline Howard contributed to this report.



[ad_2]

Source link