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(CNN) Covid-19 hospitalizations in the United States hit a record for the seventh consecutive day on Saturday with 108,487 patients in hospitals across the country, according to the Covid Tracking Project.
And the number of Covid-19 cases reported in the United States reached more than 16 million after the country added 1 million cases in just four days, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
It took the nation more than eight months to reach 8 million cases, but less than two months to double that number, as the number of new cases continues to rise.
The record for hospitalizations comes when an advisory committee to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention voted Saturday to recommend the Pfizer and BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine for patients age 16 and older.
CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield must accept the recommendation of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) before vaccines can begin. That is expected to happen in a few hours.
The vaccine couldn’t come at a more dire time.
On Friday, when the US Food and Drug Administration authorized the Pfizer vaccine for emergency use, the US recorded more than 3,300 deaths from Covid-19, the most in one day, according to University data. Johns Hopkins. More than 231,700 new cases were reported, another high pandemic.
There have been more than 100,000 Covid-19 patients in hospitals every day since December 2.
Dr. Peter Szilagyi, a pediatrician at the University of California, Los Angeles and a member of the CDC advisory committee, said he voted in favor of the vaccine “because of the clear evidence of its efficacy / safety profile and benefit profile / risk, based on our evidence and policy framework. “
“I know we are going to have very tough and difficult times ahead due to the increase and limited supply of vaccines,” Szilagyi said immediately after the committee vote. “But I am very hopeful that this is the beginning of the end of the coronavirus pandemic.”
Vaccines will be delivered to 145 facilities on Monday
The emergency use authorization (US) is an “important milestone,” FDA Commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn said in a statement on Friday. He said it comes after an “open and transparent review process that included input from independent scientists and public health experts and a thorough evaluation by the agency’s career scientists.”
An EUA does not reach full approval. Pfizer would have to submit a separate application for its vaccine to be fully licensed by the FDA.
But the US “has the promise to alter the course of this pandemic in the United States,” said Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biological Evaluation and Research.
Once the vaccines leave Pfizer’s Kalamazoo facility, they will be destined for 636 locations nationwide, Gen. Gustave Perna, director of operations for the federal government’s vaccine initiative Operation Warp, told a news conference Saturday. Speed.
“We expect 145 sites in every state to receive the vaccine on Monday, another 425 sites on Tuesday and the final 66 sites on Wednesday, completing the initial delivery of Pfizer orders for the vaccine,” Perna added.
But it will be months before most Americans get it. CDC advisers have recommended that healthcare workers and residents of long-term care facilities be first in line.
At a news conference Saturday morning, Hahn praised the FDA scientists who work around the clock to review the vaccine.
“I will absolutely accept this Covid-19 vaccine until it is available and distributed,” he said, “because I have complete confidence in the evaluation of the FDA career staff.”
“Science and data guided the FDA’s decision,” he said.
That said, “the FDA’s work to evaluate the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine does not end with this authorization,” Hahn told reporters.
Additional review is needed and full approval is not expected for months.
Of course, the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine is just one of those in development. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told ABC News on Friday that about 20 million Americans should be vaccinated by the end of the month, 50 million by the end of January, and at least 100 million people should be vaccinated by the end of February. .
Officials “remain confident,” he added, that there will be enough doses for any American who wants to get vaccinated before the summer.
Meanwhile, the United States, devastated by a rampant spread of the virus, is projected to face brutal days ahead, and precautions such as masking and social distancing will remain crucial.
“We’re having this mass casualty event every day here in the United States,” CNN medical analyst Dr. Leana Wen told CNN’s Chris Cuomo moments after the FDA clearance was announced on Friday. night. “But now we have this vaccine developed in record time that, over time, can really save us and save our country and save the world from this terrible pandemic.”
“This is really a monumental moment for us,” added Wen, an emergency medicine physician.
Overloaded hospitals in the US
The average daily cases for the past week was 210,764, another high pandemic, according to a CNN analysis of Johns Hopkins data.
Some communities have already begun to feel the impacts of Thanksgiving gatherings and trips, which officials predicted would lead to even more infections and another spike. And that increase could be followed by another increase related to the upcoming Christmas holidays, some officials have said.
Hospitals in almost every corner of the country have felt the impact. HHS data shows that more than 85% of hospitals nationwide had more Covid-19 patients last week than a month ago and, overall, roughly one in five hospitalized patients was confirmed to have Covid-19. last week, almost double the previous month. .
In the nation’s 10 largest cities, the proportion of hospital patients who had the virus ranged from 9% in New York to 23% in Chicago. Meanwhile, in El Paso, Texas, more than 50% of patients in city hospitals had Covid-19 between Nov.27 and Dec.3. That’s almost double the national average for that period.
As of Saturday, there were more than 13,000 Covid-19 patients in California hospitals, a record for the state and a 3.5% increase compared to the previous day, according to the California Department of Public Health. The state also reported a record 35,729 new cases.
‘Catastrophic and unprecedented suffering’
As of Friday, the average number of daily deaths for the previous seven days was 2,359, the highest since the pandemic began.
The next three months will be “really tough,” the CDC director warned, even with a vaccine that will be available soon.
“During the next 60 to 90 days, we will have more deaths per day than on September 11,” Dr. Robert Redfield said Thursday. “This will be a really regrettable loss of life, like everything we’ve had so far.”
And it is a reality that a vaccine authorization will not affect, he added.
Los Angeles County Public Health Director Dr. Barbara Ferrer issued a grim warning over the next few weeks, after announcing Friday that the county has doubled its number of new cases in about 10 days.
“The problem right now is what we call the Thanksgiving surge,” Ferrer said. “We had a raise, and now we have a raise as well as a raise, and it’s really hard for us to calculate exactly what we’re going to see in the next week or two.”
“We are on a very dangerous path to see unprecedented and catastrophic suffering and death here in Los Angeles County if we cannot stop the increase,” Ferrer said.
FAA urges all airports to be ready for vaccine flights
The Pfizer vaccine requires two doses administered several weeks apart to achieve 95% efficacy, with no serious side effects in clinical trials.
However, according to an FDA information document, “there is currently insufficient data to draw conclusions about the safety of the vaccine in subpopulations such as children under the age of 16, pregnant and lactating people, and the immunosuppressed.”
On Saturday, the FDA’s Dr. Marks said decisions about whether pregnant women should take the vaccine should be considered on a case-by-case basis.
“Covid-19 is not a good thing, so someone might decide that they would like to get vaccinated, but that is not something that we are recommending at this time,” Marks said. “That is something we leave to the individual.”
Meanwhile, the Federal Aviation Administration has urged airports across the country to be ready for flights with the Covid-19 vaccine even if the airport is not scheduled to receive it.
The agency told CNN on Thursday that it would order air traffic controllers to give priority clearance to flights carrying the vaccine.
States will receive shipments of the Covid-19 vaccine from Pfizer once a week to begin after the injections are implemented, said Moncef Slaoui, chief scientific advisor for Operation Warp Speed.
“The plan is to send the vaccines once a week and inform the governors a week in advance about the number of doses they will receive,” Slaoui told CNN. “Those vaccines … are intended to be used in their entirety in the population during that one week period because the same states will receive an identical number of doses in the case of the Pfizer vaccine three weeks later to administer a second dose . to recipients of the first dose earlier, “he said.
The number of vaccines will increase “week after week,” he added, as manufacturing increases.
And if the vaccine Moderna is developing is licensed, he said, “it would be a pretty significant boost to the vaccine that will be distributed.” FDA vaccine advisers will meet next week to discuss a USA for Moderna’s vaccine.
This story was first published on CNN.com, “Covid-19 Hospitalizations in the US Hit a Record for the Seventh Day in a Row.”
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