Covid 19 coronavirus: ‘We were wrong’: deathbed plea as US virus deaths skyrocket over the holidays

Deaths from Covid-19 in the United States have soared to more than 2,200 per day on average, matching the terrifying peak reached last April.

And cases per day have dwarfed an average of 200,000 for the first time on record, and the crisis is sure to get worse due to the aftermath of Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s trips and gatherings.

Before his death Friday from complications from Covid-19, former Alabama state senator Larry Dixon, 78, asked his wife from his hospital bed to convey a warning to him.

“Honey, we were wrong. We just let our guard down … We have to tell people this is real,” his friend, Dr. David Thrasher, a pulmonologist, told him.

Although Dixon had been aware of the masks and social distancing, he met friends at a restaurant for what they called a “prayer meeting,” and three of them fell ill, Thrasher said.

Virtually every state is reporting spikes just as a vaccine appears to be days away from getting the go-ahead in the United States.

“What we do now will literally be a matter of life and death for many of our citizens,” Washington Governor Jay Inslee said today, extending restrictions on businesses and social gatherings, including a ban on eating and drinking in the interior of restaurants and bars.

Although the imminent arrival of the vaccine is cause for hope, he said, “at this moment we have to face reality, and the reality is that we are suffering a very serious situation with the pandemic.”

The virus is blamed for more than 280,000 deaths and nearly 15 million confirmed infections in the United States.

Many Americans ignored the warnings not to travel on Thanksgiving Day and have ignored other safety precautions, whether out of stubbornness, ignorance or complacency. On Saturday night, Southern California police arrested nearly 160 people at an illegal party in Palmdale.

Dr. Deborah Birx, coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force, offered what sounded like a subtle rebuke of the way President Donald Trump and others in the administration have downplayed the disease and undermined to scientists.

“Messages must be critically consistent,” Birx said today at a Wall Street Journal CEO conference. “I think we need to be much more consistent in addressing the myths that exist: that Covid doesn’t really exist, or that deaths are somehow made up, or that hospitalizations are from other diseases, not Covid, which actually cover hurting you. “

On Thursday, an advisory panel from the Food and Drug Administration is expected to authorize emergency use of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine, and injections could begin almost immediately after that. Britain began dispensing the Pfizer vaccine on Tuesday, becoming the first country in the West to begin mass vaccinations.

Still, any vaccination campaign will take many months, and US health experts are warning of a continued rise in infections in the coming weeks as people gather for the holidays.

In Georgia, the number of confirmed and suspected coronavirus infections has soared more than 70 percent in the past week, and hospitals are sounding alarms about their ability to absorb new Covid-19 patients.

The stage has an average of more than 5000 confirmed and suspected cases per day. Even then, Georgia ranks 44th among states with the most new cases per capita in the past 14 days because infections are spreading so quickly everywhere else.

Georgia is likely to record its 10,000th confirmed or suspected Covid-19 death sometime this week. The state surpassed 500,000 confirmed or suspected infections overall on Sunday.

More than 2,500 Covid-19 patients were hospitalized across the state on Monday. That’s below the summer peak of 3,200, but more than double the most recent low in mid-October.

“We are effectively reversing the gains we made after the summer surge,” said Amber Schmidtke, an epidemiologist who conducts a daily analysis of Georgia’s Covid-19 numbers.

California officials painted a dire picture as more than 22,000 residents test positive for the coronavirus every day, and about 12 percent inevitably show up in hospitals within two to three weeks. They fear that the spike may soon overwhelm intensive care units.

The Southern California Riverside University Health System Medical Center opened an ICU in a storage room.

In Nevada, the number of people hospitalized with Covid-19 has more than doubled in the last month, as has the number of patients who need ventilators. And Arizona set another daily record Tuesday with more than 12,300 additional cases, eclipsing the previous mark of around 10,300 set on Dec. 1.

-AP