US states break new coronavirus records as hospitals brace for Thanksgiving surge
US states are breaking Covid-19 case records as hospitals and health workers brace for an expected increase in cases tied to travel and gatherings for the Thanksgiving holiday this week.
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The US has had 12,408,900 confirmed cases and more than 257,500 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University. On Monday, more than 85,700 people were hospitalized with the illness as healthcare workers warned of overwhelmed clinics and emergency rooms.
The daily average of cases is the highest it has ever been across the country. There were twice as many new cases a day as there were two weeks ago in nine states: Arizona, California, Delaware, Louisiana, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Vermont.
In the country’s most populous state, California, there were more than 30,000 cases over the weekend, prompting a flurry of new restrictions. Los Angeles is set to shut down restaurant dining on Wednesday and officials were expected to announce another lockdown.
Barbara Ferrer, the LA county health director, said in a statement: “The persistent high number of cases requires additional safety measures that limit mixing in settings where people are not wearing masks.”
In Phoenix, medical workers warned of shrinking space in intensive care units (ICUs) and emergency rooms as cases spiked in the region. The former US surgeon general, Dr Richard Carmona, said cases in Arizona were too high given the expected increase in cases following the holidays. There were 2,659 cases reported in the state on Monday – the highest since early July.
Carmona, who is part of a team at the University of Arizona studying coronavirus trends, told KTAR News: “We’re getting up to the level where our resources are being depleted to a very critical point.”
With cases rising across the US, hospitals and testing centers have warned of a strain in resources that could be worsened by travel and gatherings over the Thanksgiving holiday this week.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) advised people to stay home and not travel for the Thanksgiving holiday, but more people traveled this past weekend than have since the pandemic began.
The nation’s top infectious diseases expert, Dr Anthony Fauci, warned on Monday that “we are in a very steep escalation of cases” in an interview with Washington Post Live. He said that if people continued to ignore public health warnings by traveling, gathering in groups and not wearing masks, it would likely result in “a surge superimposed on a surge”.
Fauci and other medical experts have warned that the effect of holiday travel and gatherings this week won’t be seen for several weeks because of the lag between when the infection occurs and when it is detected in a test or results in hospitalization or death.
Fauci, the director of the National Institutes of Health and a member of the White House Covid-19 taskforce, also said on Monday that he has not yet spoken to president-elect Joe Biden.
That could soon change because on Monday, after weeks of refusal, Donald Trump’s administration authorized Biden to formally begin the presidential transition process. This is crucial for Biden’s Covid-19 response team to be able to prepare its pandemic response for when Biden assumes office on 20 January.
