US Coronavirus: The country has a ‘transmission level’ of covid-19, says an expert, while the country adds almost 4 million cases this month

US Coronavirus: The country has a ‘transmission level’ of covid-19, says an expert, while the country adds almost 4 million cases this month

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The total number of Covid-19 deaths in the country is now rapidly approaching 400,000 – this is more than the number of Americans who died in World War I, the Vietnam War and the Korean War combined and almost the same number of Americans who died in World War II.

And it is much higher than any other country’s Covid-19 death toll.

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

Hotez estimates that it is close to a million new infections a day.

“This is a blatant level of transmission in the United States and people are scared, they are upset,” added Hotez. “There is an enormous amount of work that will have to happen from January 20th.”

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Experts warned that while vaccines are in progress, the country is not yet out of danger, with the new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warning on Sunday that “dark weeks ahead”.

“In mid-February, we expect half a million deaths in this country,” said Dr. Rochelle Walensky to CBS’s “Face the Nation” program.

“We have not yet seen the ramifications of what happened with holiday travel, with holiday collections, in terms of high rates of hospitalizations and deaths after that,” added Walensky.

Hospitals under ‘severe stress’ next month

More than 124,300 Americans are hospitalized with the virus across the country, according to the COVID tracking project. To put this in perspective, this is more than double the country’s Covid-19 hospitalization peak in the spring, according to project data.
In their latest briefing, the projected hospitals at the University of Washington’s Institute of Health Metrics and Assessment in many states “will be under severe stress for the next four weeks.”
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This is already happening in different parts of the country.

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

Pennsylvania officials said at the end of last week that there were more than 4,900 people hospitalized with Covid-19 – almost double the spring peak.

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

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

Variant can mean a large number of cases in the spring

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

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

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“In about five weeks, this will start to take over,” said Gottlieb during an interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation” program.

“The only obstacle against this new variant is the fact that we will have a lot of infection by then, so there will be a lot of immunity in the population and we will be vaccinating more people,” he added. “But it really changes the equation and I think what we’re seeing is a relentless attack by this virus, going into the spring.”

“We could have persistently high levels of infection in the spring until we finally vaccinate enough people.”

And while Covid-19 variants are not necessarily more deadly, they can still cause more deaths, Dr. Anthony Fauci told NBC on Sunday.

“Even if on a one-to-one basis, it is no longer virulent, which means it does not make you sicker or more likely to die, just by numbers, the more cases you have, the more hospitalizations you will have, and how much the more hospitalizations you have, the more deaths you will have, “said Fauci.

12 million Americans received the 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 most recent data from the CDC.
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That’s because the country is just days away from President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration. Biden outlined a vaccination plan that includes opening eligibility for more people, creating more vaccination sites and taking steps to increase vaccine supply and distribution.

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

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And he also said he is “convinced” that his administration can meet its goal of administering 100 million vaccines in its first 100 days in office. Fauci said he believes “strongly” that this is possible.

“If we have about 70% to 85% of the people in the country vaccinated, we will probably arrive at this collective immunity umbrella,” Fauci told NBC last week. “We may start to approach some form of normality, but it will really depend on vaccine intake.”

Lauren Mascarenhas and Jacqueline Howard of CNN contributed to this report.

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