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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – US leaders urgently called on Americans to wear masks and threatened even more drastic stay-at-home orders after coronavirus deaths set a single-day record, with two people killed every minute.
More than 213,830 new cases and 2,861 deaths were reported Thursday, according to a Reuters tally of official data. With COVID-19 hospitalizations in the US also at record levels, several experts project that the death toll will soon exceed 3,000 per day.
President-elect Joe Biden promised a new national strategy that will impose mask mandates where he will have authority, such as federal buildings and for interstate travel, once he takes office as outgoing President Donald Trump on January 20.
Beyond the mandate, he urged people to voluntarily wear masks, seeking to counter lax public discipline to date and Trump’s timid endorsement of wearing masks.
“The first day I take office … I’m going to ask the public for 100 days to mask, only 100 days to mask, not forever, 100 days,” Biden told CNN in an interview Thursday. “And I think we will see a significant reduction if we do that, if that happens, with vaccines and masking, to reduce the numbers considerably.”
Two promising vaccines could soon receive emergency use authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and some 20 million Americans could be vaccinated this year, FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn told Reuters in a statement. interview on Friday.
As soon as the FDA approves a vaccine, “I will be the first in line and encourage my family to take this vaccine,” Hahn said.
Biden also told CNN that he would be happy to get publicly vaccinated, as former Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama promised, in order to boost public confidence and persuade vaccine skeptics.
Other public figures have followed, including novelist Stephen King.
“When I was a 5- or 6-year-old, I lined up with other little people to get the polio vaccine. As a 73-year-old man, I will line up for the Covid vaccine as soon as they tell me it’s time,” King said. On twitter.
THE DEMAND FOR VACCINES TO EXCEED ANTICIPATED SUPPLIES
The first U.S. government shipment of millions of doses of coronavirus vaccines is expected to be shared by state and federal agencies, including the Department of Defense. But it will be a long way from protecting high-priority groups like healthcare workers, according to a Reuters analysis.
“At the moment, and for the foreseeable future, the demand for vaccines is going to outstrip supply by far, even for the highest priority groups identified,” said Josh Michaud, associate director for global health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation. .
Dr. Anthony Fauci, a member of the White House coronavirus task force, said Friday that he expected to see another spike in infections two to three weeks after the Nov. 26 holiday, when many Americans traveled to visit their families. relatives and feared Christmas shopping. and the festivities would fuel another peak.
“We really have to step up our public health measures,” Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told NBC’s “Today” show.
Fauci also said that he has accepted Biden’s offer to be his top medical adviser, in addition to keeping his current position.
With cases in the U.S. since the pandemic began to exceed 14 million on Thursday and more than 100,000 people were hospitalized, California Governor Gavin Newsom said he would impose new and strict stay-at-home orders that They would be activated region by region when less than 15% of the capacity of the intensive care unit is available.
The University of Washington Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation now projects nearly 539,000 deaths from COVID-19 by April 1, nearly double the current number of deaths since the pandemic began, even as life-saving vaccines are becoming available.
But 66,000 people could be saved if the proportion of Americans wearing masks in public rises to 95% in the next week, the institute said.
(Reported by Doina Chiacu, Susan Heavey, Julie Steenhuysen, Rebecca Spalding, Carl O’Donnell, Peter Szekely, Anurag Maan, and Daniel Trotta; written by Daniel Trotta; edited by Chizu Nomiyama, Nick Zieminski, and Bill Berkrot)
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