Despite the deployment of two new vaccines, the pandemic is accelerating and the United States must focus on ‘one of the worst months in the history of this country in January’, said one of Elected President Joe Biden’s leading Covid-19 advisers Monday warned.
“There is no doubt about it,” said the expert, dr. Celine Gounder, told CNBC. “The cake is already in the oven, with the trip that happened during the holidays.”
The severe warning came when the number of Covid-19 infections rose by 19.2 million after Christmas and the number of coronavirus deaths was 334,000, the latest NBC News data showed.
Gounder, a member of the advisory board of Biden’s Covid-19, described a nightmare scenario in which local health officials are forced to set up field hospitals because corridors and even some parking lots are already full of sick patients.
And an even bigger crisis, according to Gounder, will find enough doctors and nurses to treat everyone.
“You can’t get new doctors and nurses up like you can set up hospitals,” Gounder said. “You can’t just create it from the air.”
In other coronavirus developments:
- Lawmakers said they were relieved that President Donald Trump on Sunday finally signed the $ 2.3 billion aid and government funding package on Sunday that helped his government negotiate – and which almost torpedoed Trump with a few final objections. Meanwhile, Trump, who spent the holidays on his Florida estate, went golf game again.
- Dr. James Phillips, who publicly criticized Trump’s run-up to supporters in October while being treated to Covid-19, tweeted that he worked his last day at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. “I stand by my words and regret nothing,” he wrote.
- More than 50 million people in America, including 17 million children, are likely to go hungry at some point before the 2020 pandemic, NBC News reported, citing gloomy statistics from Feeding America, the country’s largest anti-famine organization.
- Covid-19 was especially deadly to younger Latinos, reports NBC News.
- Efrain “Stone” Reyes, the last man to share a cell with accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, died last month of Covid-19, the New York Daily News reported. Reyes was moved to another detention center a day before Epstein hanged himself in his cell.
- Zhang Zhan, a Chinese citizen journalist whose first version of the Wuhan pandemic angered her country’s government, was convicted on charges of ‘strife and provocation’ and sentenced to four years in prison. her lawyer said.
While more than a million doses of Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines have been administered in the past week, and a third Novavax vaccine is in the late stages of development, Gounder said the rate should be increased to one million shots. . a day to stop the pandemic.
“It’s not just about the vaccines,” Gounder said. ‘You must also distribute the vaccines and you will need staff to administer the vaccines. And if staff are all tied up in ICUs overflowing with sick patients, it is very difficult to screen staff to do vaccination. ”
This is already the sad reality in Southern California, said dr. Brad Spellberg, the medical director of the Medical Center of Los Angeles County University of Southern California, told MSNBC.
Spellberg said his hospital’s intensive care unit was full “that he was up and running for three weeks,” and he struggles every day to get enough nurses to care for all of his patients.
“You can’t slap your fingers, and those people will exist,” Spellberg said. “While patients are flooding the hospital, there are just so many of the people going around.”
The incoming administration of Biden intends to enact the Defense Production Act to ensure there are enough “raw materials for the vaccines” and personal protective equipment, to increase testing and use genetic oversight to breed new strains of Covid-19 track, Gounder said.
“I think it’s going to be a major operational challenge, probably the biggest this country has ever had to undertake to vaccinate all its citizens in a timely manner,” Gounder said. ‘In the last two weeks, we have administered an average of about one million doses of vaccine per week. We need to get a million doses a day. ‘
Meanwhile, Gounder said, because so many Americans traveled and gathered for Christmas despite the numerous warnings from health experts that it was a safe way to spread the coronavirus, ‘we are going to see another boom just as we did after that. Thanksgiving. ”
The Federal Transportation Security Administration on Sunday selected 1,284,599 passengers at U.S. airports, the most since the March pandemic was declared.
“We will see another boom in January, and hospitals are going to encounter it when they are already full,” Gounder said. “We have patients being treated in the hallways or in parking lots.”
Gounder said the Biden government also intends to oversee the new Covid-19 mutations that have already made people in the UK and South Africa ill.
“We did not do it often,” Gounder said. “We have the technology. We just chose not to spend the money on such public health oversight. ”
