When the COVID-19 virus broke out in the United States back in January, it took nearly three months for the country to reach one million infections. Now, according to CNN News, the U.S. has added more than one million cases to its grim total in just five days.
From Tuesday to Saturday, 1,000,882 new coronavirus cases were reported in the US, according to data from Johns Hopkins University, bringing the total to more than 14.5 million confirmed cases and 281,212 deaths from the virus.
As we move deeper into the holiday season, we are already seeing another rise in coronavirus cases and deaths that came about after millions of Americans chose to travel during the Thanksgiving holidays, and experts say it is likely only going to get worse.
“Every single day, thousands more people are getting this virus, and we know that means that in a few days, in a week, hundreds of people are going to be coming to the hospital and hundreds of people are going to die,” Dr. Shirlee Xie, a hospitalist and associate director of hospital medicine for Hennepin Healthcare in Minneapolis, told CNN’s Ana Cabrera.
The average of deaths attributable to COVID-19 in the U.S. passed 2,000 for the first time since spring, rising to 2,011. Since last Saturday, an average of 2,000 people have died of the disease each day., Projections coming from the White House show the total number of deaths could hit half a million by March, CBS News’ Michael George reports.
More than 100,000 Covid-19 patients have been hospitalized nationwide for the past four days, according to the Covid Tracking Project. It must be said that hospitals and ICU nursing staff and doctors have been doing an heroic job of attending to the victims of this national medical emergency.
Hospitals are struggling not only with the increase in patients but with their own staff as health workers contract COVID-19 themselves or quit under the intense pressure of caring for so many infectious patients.
Many state health officials are warning of severe overcrowding as hospitalizations are rapidly stressing ICU capacity. “In less than a week, we went from exceeding 5,000 new cases reported in one day to exceeding 6,000,” said Dr. Mandy Cohen, North Carolina’s health secretary. “This is very worrisome.”
In St. Louis, two children’s hospitals opened their doors to adult patients without COVID-19 as medical centers in the region fill up, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
