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“We have learned that in these colder months, when people crowd inside, the numbers are going to go up,” CNN’s chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta said Monday night. “Hospitalizations are expected to even reach 100,000.”
“We used to talk about how the number of people getting infected for the first time on any given day reaching 100,000 seemed outrageous. There may be so many people in hospitals,” he added.
Across the country, hospitals are filling up.
In St. Louis, officials announced modeling data suggesting that ICU capacity could be depleted around the first week of December if current rates continue.
“Covid-19 is spreading too fast and is sending too many people to our hospitals and intensive care units,” St. Louis Metropolitan Pandemic Task Force Incident Commander Dr. Alex Garza said Monday. . “We are now at an inflection point. The actions we take today will determine what the next few weeks and months will be like.”
And while hundreds of Americans continue to die every day, that number will likely only increase as hospitalizations continue to rise, former FDA Commissioner Dr. Mark McClellan told CNN on Monday.
“The problem is that we have these outbreaks, these hot spot areas where we are getting closer to the capacity of the healthcare system really across the country now,” he said. “It is not just one part of the country or region.”
Preparing for a vaccine
While the high efficacy rates derived from the Moderna and Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine trials are a good first step, a vaccine has not yet been approved and experts will also have to decide which groups should be vaccinated first.
An advisory committee from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will meet next week to decide who will get the vaccine first, a longtime committee member said.
Members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices received a notice last week that they will meet on November 23 for five hours, according to committee member Dr. William Schaffner.
Among the first to be vaccinated will likely be healthcare workers and essential workers, as well as people over 65 and people with existing health problems. The question is what order those groups should come in, Schaffner said.
“Health workers are baked, that’s the first thing that happens, there’s no question about that,” he said. But after that, committee members will need to define what underlying conditions would warrant getting a vaccine early on and what defines “essential workers,” a group that could include everyone from police officers to grocery store clerks.
And even once a vaccine is approved and more doses are available, it will be months before the United States returns to anything close to normal.
“There won’t be a day where, you know, the light switch will turn on and everyone will be immune,” McClellan said. “But we should do a better job of containing the spread, avoiding hospitalizations and overcoming the pandemic in the months to come.”
“But we have a difficult couple of months to get through first,” he added.
State measures that go into effect this week
Orientation for College Students Returning Home
As the Thanksgiving holiday approaches, Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont issued guidance Monday for out-of-state college students planning to return home to the state for Thanksgiving. Thank you.
Lamont asked returning students to self-quarantine for 14 days before or after returning home, to be tested for the virus before leaving school, and after they got home, not to attend parties or gatherings. and not to quarantine themselves with any elderly or high-risk family members.
“We cannot enforce this,” he said. “I’m going to have to depend on your good judgment … that you follow the protocols, follow the quarantine and follow the tests.”
Public health officials and state leaders have repeatedly emphasized how critical the upcoming vacation is and have expressed concern that the gatherings of family and friends will help fuel an already rampant spread.
“Separation should be the norm,” this year, Schaffner also previously urged.
“Less is more this Thanksgiving,” he said. “It’s Covid Thanksgiving Day. We don’t want to spread the virus while giving thanks.”
CNN’s Lauren Mascarenhas, Elizabeth Cohen, Kelly Christ, and Raja Razek contributed to this report.
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