The global case tally for the coronavirus-borne illness COVID-19 climbed above 93 million on Friday and the death toll rose above 2 million,
with the U.S. leading all nations by cases and fatalities.
The U.S. added another 238,390 new cases on Thursday, according to a New York Times tracker, and at least 3,973 patients died. The U.S. has averaged 240,199 cases a day for the past week, exceeding the worst-case-scenario forecasts of experts back in the spring.
The U.S. has a quarter of the global case tally at 23.4 million and a fifth of deaths, at 390,195,
according to data aggregated by Johns Hopkins University.
Hospitals remain close to full capacity in many parts of the country, after rising for 16 weeks through the fall and Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year holidays, from about 36,000 a day in October to 130,000 a day this week, according to the COVID Tracking Project.
“This week, after two weeks of holiday-muddled deaths data, the inevitable consequence of these rising hospitalizations arrived,”
the organization wrote in its weekly update. “States reported 23,259 COVID-19 deaths this week, 25 percent more than in any other week since the pandemic began. For scale, the COVID-19 deaths reported this week exceed the
CDC’s current estimate for flu-related deaths during the entire 2019-2020 season.” That estimate was for 22,000 deaths.
Experts are now hoping that President-elect Joe Biden will bring much needed help to the U.S. in managing the pandemic, with his plans for a new, expanded team to direct testing, contact tracing and to bolster the vaccine program, which to date has lagged behind all of its early targets.
The
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine tracker is showing that as of 9.00 a.m. ET Thursday, just 11.1 million people had been vaccinated, way below the 20 million that were promised by end-December. Just 30.6 million doses have been distributed, or enough to vaccinate about 15 million Americans, as the vaccines that have received emergency use authorization — one developed by Pfizer Inc. and German partner BioNTech SE
BNTX, -3.14%, and another developed by Moderna Inc.
MRNA, 1.13% — require two doses.
Biden on Thursday
revealed a $1.9 trillion relief plan that will include cash payments to Americans struggling with job losses and money for distributing vaccines.
“There is real pain overwhelming the real economy,” he said. “You won’t see this pain if your scorecard is how things are going on Wall Street. But you will see it very clearly if you examine what the twin crises of a pandemic and this sinking economy have laid bare — the growing divide between those few people at the very top, who are doing quite well in this economy, and the rest of America.”
