PandemicsU.S. at “Critical Point” as COVID-19 Cases up Nationwide, Crossing the 9 Million Mark
The COVID-19 pandemic in the United States is setting new records as infections continue to spike in the Midwest and other parts of the country. A member of the White House coronavirus task force said Wednesday that the nationwide increase in cases isn’t just a reflection of increased testing. “We are at another critical point in the pandemic response,” Admiral Brett Giroir, MD, told NBC’s Today Show. “Yes, we’re getting more cases identified, but the cases are actually going up. And we know that, too, because hospitalizations are going up.”
With daily cases reaching new heights and increased hospitalizations straining local response efforts, the United States ysterday passed the 9-million COVID-19 case mark.
Cases surge to Record Ssetting Highs
The United States yesterday reported a record high, 88,521 cases, along with 971 more deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins online dashboard. The US total ysterday climbed to 9,015,262 cases and 229,347 deaths.
Colorado, Illinois, and New Mexico all reported record daily cases yesterday, and illness levels are rising in 42 states, according to a New York Times analysis.
In El Paso County, Texas, where a rise in cases is stretching hospitals, a county judge announced the closure of all non-essential businesses for 2 weeks, the Texas Tribune reported, but the state’s attorney general is challenging the order.
In other local developments, Los Angeles County yesterday reported its biggest 1-day increase (1,745) since the middle of August, and a further rise could hamper efforts to reopen schools and businesses, the Los Angeles Times reported.
And New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio said yesterday that the city’s 7-day average for test positivity rates rose to 1.92%, the highest since the middle of June, the Wall Street Journal reported. He attributed the rise to hot-spot neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens.
Hospitalization Data Inaccessible to Key Groups
At the national level, hospitalizations—a key COVID-19 marker to gauge the strain on facilities—are rising. But information gathered by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) isn’t available to the public, local officials, and research community to help tailor the response to the pandemic, including actions individuals might take to reduce their risk, National Public Radio (NPR) reported, based on recent documents that it obtained.
The updates are available to only a few government staff, the report said. HHS said its goal is to be transparent and use insights from the data to guide the response, while protecting privacy.
NPR’s review of the data shows that hospital use, which include numbers of patients on ventilators and intensive care unit (ICU) occupancy, has risen 14% to 16% over the past month, and about 24% of US hospitals are at more than 80% ICU capacity.
Nursing Homes, Antibody Therapy, and Cruise Ships
In other U.S. developments:
· Inspectors from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services who were deployed during the first 6 months of the pandemic cleared 8 in 10 nursing homes of infection-control violations, even though they had a total of 290,000 COVID-19 cases and 43,000 deaths among residents and staff, according to a Washington Post investigation.
· Regeneron, which has an antibody cocktail for treating COVID-19 in advanced clinical trials, ysterday announced that its independent monitoring board has stopped enrolling hospitalized patients who have high oxygen requirements, based on a possible safety signal and an unfavorable risk/benefit profile. However, it recommended continuing the trial in those with low or no oxygen requirements, including those in outpatient settings. Earlier this month the company submitted an application for emergency use authorization. The drug, REGN-COV2, was one of the experimental treatments that President Trump received after he was diagnosed as having COVID-19.
· The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) ysterday issued a plan for safely resuming cruise ship operations. The plan puts forward a phased approach, which stipulates that operators must first show that they can following testing, quarantine, isolation, and distancing steps. The next phases include mock voyages to test the operators’ capacity to mitigate and respond to the COVID-19 threat, and then certification and return to passenger voyages.
Lisa Schnirring is news editor at CIDRAP. This article is published courtesy of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy (CIDRAP).
