The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Daily virus deaths in U.S. set records
Hospitalizations have hit an all- time high, more than doubling in just the past month.
The United St ates has set a re c ord f or dai l y deaths f rom COVID- 19 as states drafted plans for who will go to the front of the line when the fifirst doses of vaccine become available this month.
The country recorded 2,808 deaths Wednesday and at least 2,642 more Thursday, according to the tally kept by Johns Hopkins University. Both fifigures surpassed the mark of 2,603, set on April 15, when the New York metropolitan area was the epicenter of the U. S. outbreak.
Some cities and counties across the country are imposing new restrictions as cases and deaths have surged. California announced its most aggressive steps since March to head offff the virus, saying it will impose sweeping stayat- home orders region by region when hospitals become overburdened.
In an interview with CNN, President- elect Joe Biden said he plans to ask Americans to commit to wearing masks during the fifirst 100 days of his presidency to slow the spread of the virus.
“Just 100 days to mask, not forever. One hundred days. And I think we’ll see a signifificant reduction,” he said.
Biden also said he asked Dr. Anthony Fauci to stay on in his administration, “in the exact same role he’s had for the past several presidents,” as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the nation’s top infectious disease expert.
And he added that he would be “happy” to get inoculated in public to assuage any concerns about the effifficacy and safety of vaccines now awaiting FDA approval.
With initial supplies of the vaccine certain to be limited, governors and other state offifficials are weighing both health and economic concerns in deciding the order in which the shots will be dispensed.
S t a t e s f a c e a d e a d l i n e today to submit requests for doses of the Pfizer vaccine and specify where they should be shipped, and many appear to be heeding nonbinding guidelines adopted this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to put health care workers and nursing home patients first.
But they’re also facing a multitude of decisions about other categories of residents, some of them specific to their states, some of them vital to their economies.
Plans for the vaccine are being rolled out as the surging pandemic swamps U. S. hospitals and leaves nurses and other medical workers shorthanded and burned out. Nationwide, the coronavirus is blamed for over 275,000 deaths and 14 million confirmed infections.
The number of Americans in the hospital with the coronavirus likewise hit an alltime high Wednesday at more than 100,000, according to the COVID Tracking Project. The figure has more than doubled in the past month. And new cases per day have begun topping 200,000, by Johns Hopkins’ count.
The t hree main benchmarks showed a country slipping deeper into crisis, with perhaps the worst yet to come — in part because of the delayed effects from Thanksgiving, when millions of Americans disregarded warnings to stay home and celebrate only with members of their household.
Health authorities had warned that the numbers c oul d f l uc t u a t e s t ro ngly before and after Thanksgiving, as they often do around holidays and weekends.
B e c a u s e o f r e p o r t i n g delays, t he f i gure s of t en drop, then rise sharply days later as state and local health agencies catch up with the backlog.
Still, deaths, hospitalizations and cases in the U. S. have been on a fairly steady rise for weeks, sometimes breaking records for days on end.
Keeping health care workers on their feet is considered vital to dealing with the crisis. And nursing home patients
have proven highly vulnerable to the virus. Patients and staff members at nursing homes and other long
term care centers account for 39% of the nation’s COVID19 deaths.
Advocates expressed frustration that medical workers may take priority over nursing home residents.
“It would be unconscionable not to give top priority to protect the population that is more susceptible or vulnerable to the virus,” said John Sauer, head of Leadingage in Wisconsin, a group representing nonprofit longterm care facilities.
He added: “I can’t think of a more raw form of ageism than that. The population that is most vulnerable to succumbing to this virus is not going to be given priority? I mean, that just says we don’t value the lives of people in long- term care.”