Despite the launch of two new vaccines, the pandemic is accelerating and the United States must prepare for “one of the worst months in the country’s history in January,” warned one of Covid-19’s top advisers to President-elect Joe Biden.
“There is no doubt about it,” said the expert, Dr. Celine Gounder, to CNBC. “This cake is already in the oven, with the trip that happened on vacation.”
That dire warning came when the number of Covid-19 infections increased to 19.2 million after Christmas and the number of deaths from coronavirus approached 334,000, the latest NBC News data showed.
Gounder, a member of Biden’s Covid-19 advisory board, described a nightmare scenario in which local health officials are forced to build field hospitals because corridors and even some parking lots are already full of sick patients.
And an even bigger crisis, said Gounder, will be finding enough doctors and nurses to treat everyone.
“You cannot face new doctors and nurses in the same way as you do field hospitals,” said Gounder. “You can’t just create them out of thin air.”
In other coronavirus developments:
- Lawmakers said they are relieved that President Donald Trump finally signed on Sunday the $ 2.3 trillion Covid-19 government aid and relief package that his government helped negotiate – and that Trump almost torpedoed with some objections from last hour. Meanwhile, Trump, who has been vacationing on his Florida property, was golf again.
- Dr. James Phillips, who publicly criticized Trump’s move to supporters in October, while he was being treated for Covid-19, tweeted who worked his last day at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. “I keep my words and I don’t regret anything,” he wrote.
- More than 50 million people in America, including 17 million children, are likely to starve sometime before 2020 because of the pandemic, NBC News reported, citing gloomy statistics from Feeding America, the country’s largest anti-hunger organization. .
- Covid-19 has been especially deadly to younger Latinos, reported NBC News.
- Efrain “Stone” Reyes, the last man to share a cell with sex trafficking accused Jeffrey Epstein, died last month in Covid-19, the New York Daily News reported. Reyes was transferred to a different detention center the day before Epstein hanged himself in his cell.
While more than one million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines were already administered last week and a third Novavax vaccine is in the final stages of development, Gounder said the pace needs to be accelerated to one million injections a day to stop the pandemic.
“It’s not just about vaccines,” said Gounder. “You also have to distribute the vaccines and you need staff to administer the vaccines. And when the team is all busy in ICUs that are full of sick patients, it is very difficult to divert this team to do the vaccination. “
That is already the sad reality in Southern California, said Dr. Brad Spellberg, medical director of the Los Angeles County-University of Southern California Medical Center, at MSNBC on Monday.
Spellberg said his hospital’s intensive care unit is full “for three weeks” and struggles every day to find enough nurses to care for all its patients.
“You can’t snap your fingers for these people to exist,” said Spellberg. “As patients flood the hospital, there is only one limit on these people for everyone.”
The next Biden government intends to invoke the Defense Production Act to ensure that there is sufficient “raw material for vaccines” and personal protective equipment, to increase testing and employ genetic surveillance to detect new strains of Covid-19, said Gounder .
“I think it will be a huge operational challenge, probably the biggest that this country has ever had to undertake to vaccinate all its citizens in a timely manner,” said Gounder. “In the past two weeks, we have basically administered an average of about one million doses of vaccine per week. We need to receive a million doses a day ”.
In the meantime, Gounder said that, as so many Americans traveled and gathered for Christmas, despite numerous warnings from health experts that this was an infallible way to spread the coronavirus, “we will see another wave, just as we saw after Thanksgiving. . “
The federal Transportation Security Administration screened 1,284,599 travelers at U.S. airports on Sunday, the maximum since the pandemic was declared in March.
“We will see another sudden increase in January, and hospitals will face this when they are already full,” said Gounder. “We already have patients being treated in the corridors, in the parking lots.”
Gounder said the Biden administration also plans to increase surveillance of the new Covid-19 mutations that have already made people sick in the UK and South Africa.
“We didn’t do that routinely,” said Gounder. “We have the technology. We simply chose not to spend money on this type of public health surveillance. “
