The number of Covid-19 patients in US hospitals passed 100,000 for the first time as a leading public health official warned that the country’s medical facilities would come under unprecedented stress this winter.
Covid Tracking Project data on Wednesday showed that hospitalisations have more than doubled since the end of October to reach a record 100,266. New cases jumped by a record 195,695, while 2,733 deaths were reported, the second-biggest one-day increase of the pandemic.
Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Americans faced a winter like no other because of high infection rates across the country.
“The reality is that December, January and February are going to be the most difficult time in the public health history of this nation, largely because of the stress that it is going to put on our healthcare system,” Dr Redfield said.
Los Angeles, the country’s second most populous city, on Wednesday evening issued a “safer-at-home” order directing its nearly 4m residents to remain at home except for essential activities.
Public or private gatherings involving people from more than one household are prohibited, with a few exceptions, including for some outdoor religious services and protests. Operations at non-essential businesses requiring workers to be present in person have also been ordered to stop.
“Our city is now close to a devastating tipping point, beyond which the number of hospitalised patients would start to overwhelm our hospital system, in turn risking needless suffering and death,” the order stated.
US coronavirus cases, hospitalisations and deaths have all soared in recent weeks, with more than 1m people being diagnosed nearly every week in November. While the US is expected to approve a vaccine in the coming weeks, it will not be universally available until next summer.
California, Texas and Florida — the three most populous US states — have each registered more than 1m cases since the start of the pandemic. California reported a record 20,759 new cases on Wednesday.
Dr Redfield said hospitals were already overstretched by high rates of infection across much of the country. With virtually every region affected, there were fewer places with available healthcare resources and staff that could be shifted to hotspots, he said.
Officials expect another rise in cases within the next few days because so many people ignored official advice not to travel over the Thanksgiving holiday.
“Travel volume was high over Thanksgiving,” Cindy Friedman, chief of the travellers’ health branch at CDC, told reporters on Wednesday. “Even if only a small percentage of those people were carrying the disease and passed it on to other people, that can translate into hundreds of thousands of additional infections.”
The CDC is urging people not to travel for Christmas. Those who do should get a Covid-19 test between one and three days before travelling, and again between three and five days afterwards, the agency recommended. People should avoid non-essential activities for the week after travelling, it added.
Meanwhile, the CDC relaxed its guidelines on how long people have to remain in quarantine if they come into contact with an infected person.
Instead of remaining at home for 14 days, anyone exposed to the disease can now leave quarantine after 10 days if they have no symptoms, or seven days if they test negative for the virus.
A CDC official said: “If you reduce the burden a little bit, accepting that it comes at a small cost, we may get a greater compliance overall with people completing a full seven days. If we get full compliance overall that will result in fewer infections.”
Officials have calculated the risk of someone infecting another person even after completing a 10-day quarantine period at 1 per cent, and the risk of doing so after seven days at 5 per cent.
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December 03, 2020 at 09:58PM
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Covid hospitalisations top 100000 for first time in US - Financial Times
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