It was an unhappy Thanksgiving in the battle against the pandemic. U.S. Covid-19 hospitalizations topped 90,000 for the first time Thursday, marking the 33rd consecutive day the country has set a record in that metric.
Data from The Atlantic‘s Covid Tracking Project shows that 90,481 people were hospitalized with the disease, up by 522 from Wednesday. And Johns Hopkins University reported today that another 1,232 Americans died of Covid-19 on the holiday, raising the U.S. death toll to 263,454. It also reported 110,611 new cases on Thursday, for a U.S. total of 12.88 million. The daily death and cases counts are lower from the previous because of a holiday lag in testing results.
Meanwhile, California remains a national hotspot for coronavirus, with its 10,862 new daily cases Thursday trailing only Illinois’ 12,022 ((see the chart above).
At the current rates, roughly 120 Americans are being infected every minute and about 70 are dying every hour. And the outlook for the near future doesn’t appear to be rosy.
“If the surge takes a turn of continuing to go up and you have the sustained greater than 100,000 infections a day and 1,300 deaths per day and the count keeps going up and up … I don’t see it being any different during the Christmas and New Year’s holidays than during Thanksgiving,” Dr. Anthony Fauci said.
Johns Hopkins also reported today that global Covid-19 cases have topped 61.3 million and deaths are at nearly 1.44 million.
