US hits 10 million coronavirus cases since pandemic

The United States has passed the milestone of 10 million coronavirus cases since the start of the pandemic, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. Coronavirus cases in the country currently account for nearly a fifth of all recorded cases worldwide.

The milestone was reached just hours after promising news of a coronavirus vaccine trial, as well as President-elect Joe Biden’s announcement of members of his coronavirus advisory board. He highlights the enormous challenges the Biden administration will face in bringing COVID-19 under control.

“This is a tragic step,” Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, told BuzzFeed News. “And I think we are all afraid that there is a rapid acceleration of what we are seeing.”

Recorded cases of COVID-19 are now increasing rapidly in a third wave that began to take off in September. Initially, the surges were seen primarily in the Upper Midwestern and Great Plains states, but the virus is now spreading rapidly across most of the country. The number of cases in the United States is almost certainly a considerable undercount, given that many people since the start of the pandemic may have contracted the virus but have not been tested.

More alarmingly, the number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 is also increasing rapidly and is expected to soon exceed peaks seen in April and July, when nearly 60,000 Americans were in hospital with the virus.

Thanks to improvements in treatment, including laying patients on their stomachs to help them breathe and giving the most seriously ill the steroid dexamethasone, the death rate among hospitalized people has declined significantly since the early days of the hospital. the pandemic.

But as experts predicted when the current spike in cases began to set in, the death toll in the United States is rising again – the seven-day moving average has just passed 1,000 deaths per day. At the end of last month, the nation’s top infectious disease specialist, Anthony Fauci, predicted in an interview with the Washington Post that deaths would increase. “All the stars are aligned in the wrong place during the fall and winter season, people gather at home inside. You probably couldn’t be worse off, ”he told the newspaper.

“What we’ve seen is that it’s inevitable; increases in cases are followed weeks later by increases in hospitalization and then are followed by an increase in deaths, ”said global health lawyer Alexandra Phelan of the Center for Global Health Science and Security at the University of Georgetown. “We have just seen everywhere that when cases overwhelm public health systems, overwhelm hospitals, deaths will increase.”

While medical measures to treat severe cases of COVID-19 have reduced death rates, when the number of people hospitalized exceeds capacity, the question is whether there are enough healthcare workers available to provide this care.

“When healthcare systems are overwhelmed, like we were in April here in New York City, it is difficult to provide optimal care,” Keith Sigel, associate professor at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, told BuzzFeed News by email. “It is a worrying situation.”

The United States is not the only country struggling with a growing COVID-19 crisis. Many Latin American countries have high death rates; As the northern hemisphere enters winter, cases and deaths are also increasing dramatically in Europe. Indeed, the worldwide death toll recorded daily is now higher than it was in April, when European countries including Italy, the United Kingdom and Spain, as well as American cities , led by New York, Detroit and New Orleans, have been hit hard by the virus.

“The difference between the United States and other countries is that we have never really, except New York, got the epidemic under control,” said Phelan.

Plus, as the numbers rise in other countries, Benjamin said, “they’re making some really definitive and informed decisions to fight the disease – decisions that we haven’t made in this country yet.