US breaks daily record of new coronavirus infections, topping 108,000 cases

It’s a reality that seemed far away a few weeks ago, when health experts predicted the nation would eventually reach those levels of infection. Now those same experts are concerned at just how soon it happened.

“I was predicting just a week or two ago we’d hit 100,000 (new cases a day),” said William Haseltine, a former Harvard Medical School professor and chair of ACCESS Health International, a global health think tank. “I didn’t imagine it would be already there.”

Thursday saw at least 108,174 new cases, according to Johns Hopkins University, the highest total of daily infections on record. The five highest daily totals of coronavirus cases since the pandemic began have happened in the last week.

As the US continues to shatter daily case records, so too do states across the nation: Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Utah and Wisconsin are among those that set new daily records for infections on Thursday.

Hospitalizations and deaths are also surging nationwide, and the situation is expected to get worse. A set of forecasts published Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention projects that the nation’s death toll from Covid-19 will reach 266,000 by November 28.

In response, some officials are enacting new rules to try to control the virus’ spread.

16 states set new records for hospitalizations

Covid-19 hospitalizations reached all-time highs in 16 states Wednesday, according to the Covid Tracking Project: Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

“Our number of hospitalized people goes up every day. These are a lot of Kentuckians who are fighting for their lives,” Gov. Andy Beshear said Wednesday. “There’s a lot of pain out there and it’s hitting everybody.”

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The state’s health commissioner, Dr. Steven Stack, said he’s concerned “not that we will first run out of bed space but that we may not have enough health care workers to staff all those beds.”

Kansas is suffering another “very difficult week for virus spread” — especially with rising hospitalizations, Gov. Laura Kelly said Wednesday.

Last week, the closest available ICU bed to one rural hospital was about a six-hour drive away, Kelly said.

Across the US, more than 52,000 people were hospitalized Wednesday with coronavirus, according to the Covid Tracking Project.

And at least 1,060 new Covid-19 deaths were reported Thursday, according to Johns Hopkins.

In just 10 months, more than 9.5 million people in the US have been infected with coronavirus, and more than 234,000 have died.

The battle over a shutdown

El Paso, Texas, reached a record-high number of hospitalizations Wednesday, with at least 1,041 Covid-19 patients hospitalized in the city.

Coronavirus is spreading so rampantly in El Paso County that a fourth mobile morgue was headed to the area this week.

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County Judge Ricardo Samaniego, the top government official in the county, ordered a two-week shutdown of all nonessential services last week. Without such measures, he said, “we will see unprecedented levels of deaths.”

But the Texas attorney general said his office has filed a motion for a temporary injunction to stop the judge’s “unlawful lockdown order, which flies in the face of Gov. Greg Abbott’s executive orders on COVID-19.”

Abbott said Samaniego “illegally” shut down businesses. He said the county judge “made it clear that he had not been enforcing existing protocols allowed under law” that could help curb the virus “while allowing businesses to safely open.”

From curfews to mask mandates to crowd control, other state and local officials are scrambling to control Covid-19 during what doctors say will be the worst surge yet.

Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker announced a stay-at-home advisory earlier this week that will be going into effect from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m.

Baker also announced new restrictions around gatherings and a new closing time for indoor facilities, theaters and other venues.

Connecticut announced new capacity limits on restaurants, religious ceremonies and indoor event spaces.

Gov. Ned Lamont also recommended residents stay home between 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. to limit the spread through social gatherings — a primary source of infection during this fall surge.

Those who can’t work from home may be at higher risk of getting Covid-19

Employed adults who tested positive for Covid-19 were almost twice as likely to report regularly going to a workplace than those who tested negative, according to research published Thursday in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

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A CDC-led team looked at 314 US adults: 153 were symptomatic and had positive Covid-19 PCR tests and 161 were symptomatic people with negative test results.

Of 248 participants who reported their telework status in the two weeks before illness onset, those who had positive Covid-19 test results were more likely to report going exclusively to a workplace.

The findings highlight socioeconomic differences among participants who did and did not telework, the authors wrote. Non-White employees and those who earned less had less opportunity to telework.

“Allowing and encouraging the option to work from home or telework, when possible, is an important consideration for reducing SARS-CoV-2 transmission,” the authors wrote.

When teleworking isn’t possible, worker safety measures should be scaled up, they said.

CNN’s David Close, Naomi Thomas, Amanda Watts, Kay Jones, Brad Parks, Gregory Lemos, Claudia Dominguez and Joe Sutton contributed to this report.

source: cnn.com