WASHINGTON (CNN) – As the US prepares to fight the potential increases in COVID-19, hospitals across the country have reported more than 100,000 patients for the 26th day in a row.
December has been a devastating month for the spread of coronavirus in the United States. More than 63,000 Americans have died so far this month – most since the start of the pandemic – bringing the total to more than 333,000 people lost to the virus in the United States, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. With a total of 19.1 million infected people, there are currently 118,720 people currently hospitalized The COVID follow-up project was reported.
A Southern California hospital is facing the possibility of rationing the limited number of intensive care beds and treatment equipment due to the increase in cases, which means that health care providers may have to make decisions about who gets treatment and who doesn’t. , infectious disease specialist Dr. Kimberly Shriner told CNN on Sunday.
Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena is preparing for the “final triage” if cases continue to rise in the coming weeks, Shriner said.
And with the waves of holiday travel, health experts predict that cases will only increase. More than 1.1 million people were examined at airports on Saturday, according to the TSA. Over 616,000 were screened on Christmas alone and hundreds of thousands more traveled in the days leading up to the holiday.
Dr. Anthony Fauci described the potential impact of the holiday season as “growth after growth.”
“If you look at the slope, the inclination of the cases we experienced as we reached the end of autumn and soon the beginning of winter is really quite worrying,” said Fauci.
“As we go into the next few weeks,” he added, “it could actually get worse.”
Complexity at every step for vaccine distribution
Nearly 2 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine have been administered in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and more than 9.5 million doses have been distributed.
These numbers now include both Pfizer / BioNTech vaccines and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines. And while there are delays in reporting the data, federal officials have previously said they are working to distribute 20 million doses by the end of the year.
Asked about the apparent slow release of vaccines, Fauci told CNN on Sunday that large and comprehensive vaccine programs with a new vaccine are starting slowly before gaining momentum.
“I’m pretty confident that as we gain more and more momentum, as we move from December to January and then from February to March, I think we’ll catch up with the projection,” he said.
Dr. Esther Choo, a professor of emergency medicine at Oregon Health & Science University, explained that the distribution of the vaccine is “just a very complicated thing.”
“At every step, there is complexity and there are possibilities for delay, whether it is individual state planning, allocation, training, vaccine delivery, storage … there are (are) so many factors at this stage,” he said. Choo.
“We need to be prepared for the fact that it will be a slow launch in many places and that it will not necessarily change our behavior or the trajectory of the pandemic in this country in the short term,” Choo said.
Given that vaccines are unlikely to be widely available until the summer, experts have warned Americans not to let their guards down as vaccinations begin and to continue to wear masks, distance themselves socially, avoid crowds and gatherings. and wash your hands regularly.
Moving the poles for the herd’s immunity
For vaccines to really catch and get the herd’s immunity against the virus, 70 percent to 85 percent of the population should get it immunity, Fauci said Sunday.
Fauci acknowledged that the statement moves the gate pillars, which he had previously set between 70% and 75%.
“We have to realize that we have to be humble and do what we don’t know,” he said. “These are pure estimates, and the calculations we did, from 70 (percent) to 75%, are a range.”
“The range will be somewhere between 70 (percent) and 85%,” Fauci said, adding that the reason he started saying 70% to 75% and then bought it up to 85%, which said that it is not a big leap, “it was really based on pure calculations and extrapolation from measles”.
The measles vaccine is about 98 percent effective, Fauci said, and when less than 90 percent of the population is vaccinated against measles, there is a breakthrough against herd immunity and people are getting infected.
“So I made a calculation that COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, is not as transmissible as measles, measles being the most transmissible infection you can imagine,” he said. “So, I would imagine that you would need a little less than 90%, there I reached 85.”
“We believe the vaccine will be effective against the variant”
Although there is a risk that a variant of coronavirus will go from the UK to the US, a US official said that Americans can still protect themselves with the same mitigation measures.
“We believe the vaccine will be effective against this variant,” Admiral Brett Giroir, the US secretary of human services and health, told Fox News on Sunday.
Giroir said the US has an extra layer of protection over last week’s CDC announcement of new test requirements for travelers arriving from the UK, which will take effect on Monday.
Passengers must have had a negative PCR or antigen test within 72 hours of boarding a flight from the United Kingdom to the United States, together with documentation of their laboratory results. Airlines will be asked to confirm the test before the flight.
“I think we will be pretty safe with them, because again we will be launching vaccines that will be extremely effective against all the strains that exist,” Giroir told Fox.
Although Fauci said it could be argued that the decision should have been made earlier, he called the testing requirement “prudent.”
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