The US has added a whopping 3.9 million new Covid-19 cases and over 51,000 coronavirus-related deaths just past the midway of January.
According to an expert, the number of new Covid-19 cases in the US represent a 'screaming level' of transmission in the country. The total Covid-19 death toll in the US is nearing 400,000.
This number of deaths goes beyond the combined number of Americans who died in World War I, Vietnam War and the Korean War and is almost as many as those who died in World War II.
Screaming level of Covid-19 transmission
Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, said: "The numbers are quite dire. This is a screaming level of transmission across the United States and people are scared, people are upset."
"There is an enormous amount of work that's going to have to happen starting January 20," Dr. Hotez added.
A recent study indicated that hundreds of thousands more infections continue to be reported on a daily basis and that the US has had over 200,000 daily cases on all but three days this January.
Since the actual number of cases may be several times higher than those reported, Hotez estimates that there were actually almost a million new cases daily in the US.
Despite the ongoing and upcoming vaccination efforts, experts have warned that the country is still not out of danger. Dr. Rochelle Walensky, incoming director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said there are "dark weeks ahead."
Dr. Walensky warned: "By the middle of February, we expect half a million deaths in this country. We still yet haven't seen the ramifications of what happened from the holiday travel, from holiday gathering, in terms of high rates of hospitalizations and the deaths thereafter."
New Covid-19 strains likely from the US
Two new Covid strains are believed to have originated in the US, one of which became dominant in Columbus, according to researchers.
The US Covid strains seem to make Covid-19 more transmissible but do not appear to be a threat to the effectiveness of the vaccines, they said.
The Ohio State University researchers have not yet released their study but said a non-peer-reviewed study will be published. Jason McDonald, a spokesman for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told CNBC that the agency is studying the new research.
One of the new Covid strains, detected in one patient in Ohio, shows a mutation identical to the now-dominant variant in the UK, according to the researchers. They explained that it "likely arose in a virus strain already present in the United States." However, the "Columbus strain," which the researchers claim has become dominant in the city, includes "three other gene mutations not previously seen together in SARS-CoV2."
"This new Columbus strain has the same genetic backbone as earlier cases we’ve studied, but these three mutations represent a significant evolution," Dr. Dan Jones, vice-chair of the division of molecular pathology at Ohio State and lead author of the study, said in a statement. "We know this shift didn’t come from the U.K. or South African branches of the virus."
