Thanksgiving looking up, but hot spots linger
Hospitals in cold areas full of COVID-19 patients
U.S. is facing its second Thanksgiving of the pandemic in better shape than the first time, thanks to the vaccines, though some regions are seeing surges of COVID-19 cases that could get worse as families travel the country for gatherings that were impossible a year ago.
Nearly 200 million Americans are fully vaccinated. That leaves tens of millions who have yet to get a shot, some of them out of defiance. Hospitals in the cold Upper Midwest, especially Michigan and Minnesota, are filled with COVID-19 patients who are mostly unvaccinated.
Michigan hospitals reported about 3,800 coronavirus patients at the start of the week, with 20% in intensive care units, numbers that approach the bleakest days of the pandemic’s 2020 start. The state had a seven-day new-case rate of 616 per 100,000 people Monday, highest in the nation.
In the West, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Utah and Montana also ranked high. Some Colorado communities, including Denver, are turning to indoor mask orders to reduce risk, a policy that has also been adopted in the Buffalo, New York, area and Santa Cruz County, California.
The statistics in Michigan are “horrible,” said Dr. Matthew Trunsky, a respiratory specialist at Beaumont Health in suburban Detroit.
“We got cold and moved indoors and have huge pockets of unvaccinated people,” he said. “You can’t have pockets of unvaccinated people who don’t want to be masked and not expect to get outbreaks, not expect to lose parents, not expect to lose teachers.”
During a recent office visit, Trunsky encouraged a patient who uses oxygen to get vaccinated. The patient declined and now is in the hospital with COVID-19, desperately relying on even more oxygen, Trunsky said.
He said he continues to encounter patients and their family members espousing conspiracy theories about the vaccine.
“We’ve had several people in their 40s die in the last month – 100% unvaccinated,” Trunsky said. “It’s just so incredibly sad to see a woman die with teenagers. Especially with that age group, it’s nearly 100% preventable.”
In Detroit, where fewer than 40% of eligible residents were fully vaccinated, Mayor Mike Duggan said hospitalizations have doubled since early Novemthe ber.
“We have far too many people in this country that we have lost because they believed some nonsense on the internet and decided not to get the vaccine,” said Duggan, a former hospital executive.
Despite hot spots, the outlook in the U.S. overall is significantly better than it was at Thanksgiving 2020.
Without the vaccine, which became available in mid-december 2020, the U.S. a year ago was averaging 169,000 cases and 1,645 deaths per day, and about 81,000 people were in the hospital with COVID-19.
The U.S. now is averaging 95,000 cases, 1,115 deaths and 40,000 in the hospital.
Airports have been jammed. More than 2.2 million people passed through security checkpoints on Friday, the busiest day since the pandemic shut down travel early in 2020.