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The coronavirus outbreak in the United States has frequently damaged records this winter, but Saturday marked a gruesome milestone – a month of more than 100,000 consecutive daily coronavirus hospitalizations.
The average case also hit an all-time high of more than 275,000 on Saturday, according to the knowledge of the COVID Tracking Project. The death toll in the United States has exceeded 350,000.
Average hospitalizations in the United States have more than tripled in the past 3 months, driven by vacation travel, fatigue from a pandemic and resistance from many state officials to impose new lockdown restrictions.
As of December 28, at least 280 hospitals nationwide have reached or exceeded the maximum extensive care capacity of 4,824 hospitals for which knowledge is available, according to the knowledge of the Department of Health and Human Services. In the week leading up to Christmas, nearly a fifth of US hospitals with large care teams reported that at least 95% of their ICU beds were full.
But hospitalizations are a lagging indicator: they reflect cases diagnosed a week ago.
“It takes five to 10 days after exposure to be in poor health with COVID, and then it takes another week after that to be in poor enough health to require hospitalization,” said Megan Ranney, an emergency physician at Brown University. Within the business community.
This means that other people hospitalized around Christmas may have been inflamed around Thanksgiving. Experts don’t expect infections that occurred over the Christmas holidays to count in the knowledge of hospitalization for at least a week, maybe longer.
“We will all be flying each other through the next difficult months,” Ranney said in December.
The approval of the coronavirus vaccines, he added, represents “a soft end of the tunnel,” but the worst days of the pandemic are likely yet to come.
The United States may see 210,000 more deaths from coronavirus through April, bringing the total number of deaths to more than 560,000, predicts the Institute for Health Measurement and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington.
With the holidays over, American hospitals say they have never been so stressed.
Many hospitals lack non-public ventilators and protective devices (PPE) like masks, face shields or gowns, forcing them to reuse those fabrics as many times as possible. In a December survey by the Association of Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology, 73% of infection prevention experts said they had sacrificed their same old criteria for care due to a shortage of ventilators.
Without enough beds to treat patients, hospitals also have to make difficult calls about who to admit or who prioritizes treatment.
“It’s one of the hardest things for me and my colleagues to send a patient home when we admit them,” Dr. Frank LoVecchio, an emergency physician at Valleywise Health in Arizona, told Fox 10 Phoenix. “But you get to that point where the wants outweigh what’s available. “
Some hospitals have had to transfer patients to other places of care, while others are forced to read about them in tents or waiting rooms. Dr. Elaine Batchlor, executive director of Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital in Los Angeles, California, told CNN that her hospital has begun treating patients in the gift shop and chapel.
A tsunami of coronavirus patients also poses an increased disease threat to hospital staff. When this happens, hospitals can become even more stressed.
Josh Mugele, an emergency room physician at Northeast Georgia Medical Center in Gainesville, Georgia, told Business Insider that he was “very nervous” about contracting the virus in December. His hospital had reached its maximum capacity for extensive care, having noticed more coronavirus patients than at any time during the pandemic.
Mugele diagnosed with COVID-19 last week. He suspects it flares up while running on Christmas nights.
“It’s frustrating now that someone has to control my shift,” he says. “Changes in those days are difficult. They are simply stressful. There are many people in poor health.
Get the latest research on the economic and advertising effect of coronaviruses from Business Insider Intelligence on how COVID-19 affects industries.