The U.S. is bracing for the worst four months of the Covid-19 pandemic as the country reports 120,000 new cases a day.
Ohio witnessed “unprecedented spike” in Covid-19 hospitalizations while ICU beds in Tulsa, Oklahoma, are all occupied. North Dakota’s hospitals do not have enough doctors and nurses who can attend to patients. Meanwhile, hospital officials in Iowa are saying that they are almost at their limits.
The U.S. is heading for a “dark winter,” a “Covid hell,” the “darkest days of the pandemic.” However you describe it, the next few months of the coronavirus pandemic will be unlike anything the nation has seen yet.
The country's over 120,000 new Covid-19 infections a day sets a dangerous sign as the country approaches the holiday season, medical experts warn.
Coronavirus cases are increasing at a faster pace, with about 33% increase in the seven-day average over the past week, based on a CNBC analysis of data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. The number of people confined in hospitals across the U.S. also stands at a record 61,964, according to the COVID Tracking Project.
Meanwhile, the country is approaching a deadly winter and spring, said Dr. Isaac Bogoch, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Toronto.
“The upcoming holidays of Thanksgiving, Diwali, Christmas, Hanukkah and New Year’s create the potential for innumerable super-spreading events across the country,” he stressed. “This has the potential to introduce and reintroduce the virus to new areas and to further exacerbate community transmission.”
Deaths in December
Ali Mokdad, a professor of global health at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, warned that more deaths could happen in December than the U.S. saw in March and April. The country was posting around 20,000 to 30,000 new infections and more than 2,000 deaths a day in spring.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that daily deaths are increasing. It adds that “newly reported COVID-19 deaths will likely increase over the next four weeks, with 4,600 to 11,000 new deaths likely to be reported in the week ending” Nov. 28.
“Unfortunately, the worst days are ahead of us,” Mokdad said. “We are starting from a worse position, because we didn’t do a good job in the summer to bring it down and then we see right now a rapid rise in cases, so the surge of fall and winter has started. That’s why the worst days are ahead of us.”
“This virus is now spread across the entire United States. When the first surge came, it was localized to the Northeast in New England, New York, New Jersey. In the second wave, it was the South and Southwest,” said Dr. Megan Ranney, an emergency physician at Brown University. “But now we’re seeing it literally take over hospitals across the country.”
President-elect Joe Biden has urged Americans to wear a mask as coronavirus cases throughout the country soar.
He said that wearing a mask could help the country manage the coronavirus pandemic, save lives, and allow schools and businesses to reopen.
“We have not even come close to the peak and, as such, our hospitals are now being overrun,” Osterholm stressed. “The next three to four months are going to be, by far, the darkest of the pandemic.”
