More people were hospitalized in the U.S. on Monday with the coronavirus than at any other time since the pandemic began, more than 121,000.
According to the COVID Tracking Project, the U.S. reported 121,235 patients hospitalized. ICU coronavirus patients have increased from 16% in September to 40% last week.
December has been the deadliest month of the outbreak in the U.S. yet, with about 65,000 deaths in December so far, according to the coronavirus source. The nation has repeatedly recorded more than 3,000 dead per day during the last few weeks.
Johns Hopkins is reporting the U.S. continues to lead the world in the number of coronavirus cases — 19.3 million — and deaths, with more than 335,000. Globally, more than 81 million cases have been reported around the world, with 1.7 million deaths.
Health experts are warning, according to CNN, that if hospitalizations increase, medical facilities may have to ration their care.
“When you run out of capacity, physicians and bioethicists in these hospitals will need to decide which patients are salvageable — potentially salvageable — and which patients aren’t,” CNN medical analyst Dr. Jonathan Reiner said.
The CEO of Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital in Los Angeles, Dr. Elaine Batchlor, told CNN, “if we continue to see an increase in the number of COVID patients, we may be forced to do something that, as health professionals, we all really just loathe having to even think about.”
On Monday, a huge U.S. study of another COVID-19 vaccine candidate got underway as states continue to roll out scarce supplies of the first shots to a nation anxiously awaiting relief from the catastrophic outbreak.
Public health experts say more options in addition to the two vaccines now being dispensed — one made by Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech, the other by Moderna — are critical to amassing enough shots for the country and the world.
The candidate made by Novavax Inc. is the fifth to reach final-stage testing in the United States. Some 30,000 volunteers are needed to prove if the shot — a different kind than its Pfizer and Moderna competitors — really works and is safe.
“If you want to have enough vaccine to vaccinate all the people in the U.S. who you’d like to vaccinate — up to 85% or more of the population — you’re going to need more than two companies,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious disease expert, told The Associated Press on Monday.
And the U.S. could face a terrible winter: Despite warnings to stay home and avoid others over Christmastime, nearly 1.3 million people went through the nation’s airports on Sunday, the highest one-day total since the crisis took hold in the U.S. nine months ago.
The Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed expects to have shipped 20 million doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines to states by the beginning of January, fewer than originally estimated to the frustration of states and health officials trying to schedule the shots.
There is no real-time tracking of how quickly people are getting the first of the two required doses. As of Monday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had reports of more than 2.1 million vaccinations out of 11.4 million doses shipped — but the agency knows that count is outdated. It can take days for reports from vaccine providers to trickle in and get added to the site.
Yet another worry hanging over the vaccine scramble: Will shots block a new variant of the coronavirus that emerged in Britain and might spread more easily? Fauci said that data from Britain indicates the vaccines still will protect against the virus but that National Institutes of Health researchers will be “looking at it very intensively” to be sure.
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