- The latest coronavirus update for the US as a whole includes an ominous warning inherent in it as we head into the winter months and particularly flu season.
- Several states hit records in terms of coronavirus cases over the weekend.
- This is why Dr. Anthony Fauci had previously warned Americans to “hunker down” and be prepared for a tough fall and winter.
In one of his many recent coronavirus updates, White House health advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci had warned Americans to be prepared for an arduous fall and winter and to be prepared to “hunker down” and do the right things to get the coronavirus pandemic under control. It’s a task that is extremely critical as we move into the flu season period, when the flu will be spreading at the same time that COVID-19 is still a very real and persistent threat, giving the US a kind of double whammy in the form of two nasty respiratory viruses that could potentially strain the health care system.
Nevertheless, here we are. Each day for the last four days, according to a Business Insider analysis, the US has recorded more than 50,000 new coronavirus cases (Fauci has previously said we need to be reporting a fraction of that in the lead-up to winter). Moreover, the BI analysis which is based on data from The COVID Tracking Project also shows that over the weekend, 12 states hit a new record regarding their seven-day rolling average of coronavirus cases. The states included Alaska, Colorado, Indiana, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Nebraska, Oregon, South Dakota, and Utah, all of which reported more new COVID-19 cases in the last seven days than ever before in a one-week time frame.
This is why Fauci said, during a panel discussion in September with Harvard Medical School, that “as we get into the fall and we do more indoor things, we are likely to see upticks in COVID-19.” Along these same lines, a COVID-19 model from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington School of Medicine is forecasting that the total death count in the US from coronavirus will almost double where it stands now, to 400,000, by February.
“These are extremely alarming trends, and there should be warning bells going off around the country,” emergency medicine physician Dr. Leana Wen told CNN in an interview. “Some will say, ‘Well look, we are having increasing numbers of cases because we’re testing more.’ But we also know that in more than 15 states, the test positivity rate is over 10% — which means that we’re not doing nearly enough testing.”
Perhaps most worrisome of all, according to Wen, many parts of the country are seeing instances where half or more of all COVID-19 cases can’t be traced back to a single, definite point of infection. “Which also means that there is a high level of community spread.”
