More than 205,000 new cases were reported Friday — which likely consists of both Thursday and Friday reports in some cases, as at least 20 states did not report Covid-19 numbers on Thanksgiving.
The US has now reported more than 100,000 infections every day for 25 consecutive days, with a daily average of more than 166,000 across the last week — almost 2.5 times higher than the summer’s peak counts in July.
And daily Covid-19
deaths in the US have been heading up. The daily average across seven days was 1,477 on Friday. But more than 2,100 deaths were reported on each of the two days prior to Thanksgiving, the first time that level was crossed on consecutive days since late April.
And while there is
more good news on the vaccine front, for now Americans need to “hunker down” and prepare for a difficult winter ahead, according to Dr. Leana Wen, an emergency physician and a visiting professor at George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health.
“We cannot let our guard down,” she told CNN Friday night. “The vaccines will make a big difference in the spring and the summer; they’re not going to make a difference right now.”
Based on the current Covid-19 numbers in the US, the country is far from rounding the corner, she said.
“If anything, we are rounding the corner into a calamity,” Wen said. “We’re soon going to exceed well more than 2,000 deaths, maybe 3,000, 4,000 deaths every single day here in the US.”
That projection has been echoed by other experts including Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a professor of medicine at George Washington University, who
predicted Wednesday the country’s daily death toll would likely double in 10 days, and soon see “close to 4,000 deaths a day.”
The US has so far recorded more than 4 million official coronavirus cases in November, representing roughly 30% of the country’s pandemic total of
13.1 million official cases, according to Johns Hopkins University data.
Researchers have cautioned that total probably is a vast undercount, partly because of limited test availability, especially early in the pandemic.
A modeling study published this week by CDC researchers suggests only about one in eight coronavirus infections in the United States were recognized and reported through the end of September. That would mean
as many as 53 million people in the United States could have been infected from February through September.
A busy travel weekend expected
The Thanksgiving travel and gatherings that took place this past week will likely only further push cases upward, experts have said.
Reiner previously described the holiday as “potentially the
mother of all superspreader events,” with Americans leaving from every airport in the country and possibly carrying the virus with them, oftentimes unknowingly.
The
US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned Americans to avoid travel for Thanksgiving, but
millions have flown since that warning. Travel industry groups expect Sunday — as everyone heads home from their holiday destinations — to be the
busiest day of travel since the pandemic began.
To prevent further spread of the virus, everyone who traveled…
Read More News: US is ’rounding the corner into a calamity,’ expert says, with Covid-19 deaths
