US Coronavirus: the country has five deadliest days since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in the past two weeks

The total number of Covid-19 deaths in the country has now risen to over 365,200, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. And nearly 115,000 others could lose their lives in the next four weeks, according to projections from the University of Washington Institute of Health Metrics and Assessment.

The top Arizona health official said on Thursday that “coming out of the Christmas holiday,” Covid-19 numbers in the state are rising slowly.

And although vaccinations have been going on for several weeks, it will take months for them to spread enough to have a significant impact on the course of the pandemic, experts warned.

Health officials say they “promised too much” when the vaccine was launched

The vaccine launch will need a few weeks to update, said Dr. Anthony Fauci on Thursday, and if it doesn’t, changes will need to be made.

“I think it would be fair to just watch what is going to happen in the coming weeks,” he told NPR. “If we don’t achieve the original goal, then we really need to make some changes to what we’re doing.”

“We just need to take a little time off – not a lot – but enough to say, well, we’ve spent the holiday season, now we’re really going to turn on the afterburner,” he added.

“We over-promised and under-delivered as a nation,” said Dr. Steven Stack, commissioner of the Kentucky Department of Public Health, at a briefing on Thursday sponsored by the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. “We achieved only a third of what we thought we would get based on the initial modeling.”

“If we had only projected realistic quantities, the public would not have seen this as a deficiency – we would have recognized the incredible achievement it was to have even so much vaccine so fast,” said Stack.

Other health leaders said that states need more money and more staff to be able to administer vaccines quickly enough.

Pennsylvania Health Secretary Dr. Rachel Levine said states, cities and territories received only $ 340 million to build the infrastructure for vaccine launches by the end of the year.

“This is clearly insufficient to achieve what we are trying to achieve,” said Levine.

The money will be “critical to several aspects of our response,” added Levine, including hiring companies to run community vaccine clinics.

New studies offer more information about the Covid-19 transmission

Meanwhile, new discoveries now help shed more light on the transmission of the virus.

A team of researchers found that more than half of Covid-19 cases may have been transmitted by people who had no symptoms. It is a model – not a real-life study – but based on data from eight studies in China, about 59% of all transmission came from people without symptoms, the researchers said.

“In a series of plausible scenarios, at least 50% of the transmission was estimated to have occurred in people without symptoms,” wrote the team in the newspaper JAMA Network Open.

Three weeks after the opening of colleges or universities for face-to-face education, the counties that housed these institutions “experienced a 56% increase in incidence,” wrote researchers led by the CDC in the agency’s weekly report.

Meanwhile, the incidence has decreased by 5.9% in counties without major universities and 17.9% in those with universities that teach remote classes, they found.

Over the course of the pandemic, many universities struggled in their response to the virus, some choosing to start the fall semester with face-to-face classes and converting to remote programs after an increase in infections, while others tried to control the spread of the virus by banning events like parties and student meetings.

In Arkansas, fraternity and fellowship meetings and activities have been linked to hundreds of Covid-19 cases at a university, a new report revealed.

The study, published in the CDC’s Weekly Morbidity and Mortality Report, described more than 960 confirmed and probable cases at an unidentified university in the state – 97% of whom were aged 18 to 24.

Researchers from the state health department and the CDC said 54 meetings were linked to cases at the university and more than 90% of those events involved brotherhoods and fraternities.