U.S. averaging 700K new COVID-19 cases per day
The coronavirus hospitalizations reached a record high in the United States on Monday, according to Reuters. There were 132,646 people hospitalized with COVID-19, surpassing the record of 132,051 set in January last year.
The COVID-19 hospitalizations are once again ticking upward in the United States with thousands more people filling hospital beds across the country in the past four weeks.
The surge in infections is caused by the highly contagious Omicron variant which the experts say will likely prove less deadly than prior strains of the virus. However, the sheer number of infections was putting a strain on hospitals, some of which are struggling to keep up with the influx of patients.
“It’s sort of like medical throughput gridlock,” said Dr. Peter Dillon, the chief clinical officer at Penn State Health in Pennsylvania. “There (are) so many forces now contributing to the challenges and I think there’s an element, I don’t want to say despair, but of fatigue.”
The seven-day average for newly reported cases in the U.S. topped 700,000 for the first time, according to Johns Hopkins University data.
White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said the United States may hit 1 million new COVID cases a day. “It’s still surging upward. We had about 745,000 cases yesterday. I would not be surprised at all if we go over a million cases per day,” Fauci told News 4.
However, he expressed hope that the infections would come down by the end of this month. “I can’t predict accurately, because no one can … but I would hope that by the time we get to the fourth week in January … end of the third week, beginning of the fourth week – that we will start see this coming down,” Fauci said.
