The number of COVID-19 patients currently being treated in hospitals across the United States nearly doubled in the last month, hitting more than 91,000 over the Thanksgiving weekend.
As of Saturday 91,635 Americans were hospitalized with the virus, according to the COVID Tracking Project.
The rate of hospitalizations – now at the highest level since the pandemic began – comes after weeks of rising infection rates nationwide, with 16 states reporting record seven-day averages for daily new cases on Thursday and Friday.
Doctors and health officials fear the US is in for a dark few weeks with cases and deaths expected to climb rapidly because of holiday gatherings and travel.
Dr Celine Gounder, a member of President-elect Joe Biden’s COVID-19 advisory board, offered a grave warning about forthcoming spikes on Saturday – after millions of Americans traveled for Thanksgiving against the advice of public health officials.
‘We fully expect that in about a week or two after Thanksgiving we will see an increase in cases first, then about a week or two later you’ll start to see an increase in hospitalizations, and then another week or two after that you’ll start to see deaths,’ Gounder told CBS News, noting that symptoms of the virus can develop up to 14 days after exposure.
‘Unfortunately, that means that many people who celebrated with family, with friends over Thanksgiving will find themselves in the hospital, in ICUs over Christmas and New Years,’ she added.
Nationwide 155,596 new cases and 1,189 deaths were reported on Saturday, bringing the totals to over 13.2 million and 266,074, respectively. Daily figures over the past few days have been skewed by inconsistencies in reporting around Thanksgiving.
Health experts and politicians pleaded with Americans to avoid gathering for traditional communal Thanksgiving feasts this year, warning that socializing between households would accelerate the rate of community transmission and put even more stress on an already overwhelmed healthcare system.
While some heeded those warnings and spent Thanksgiving with family via video calls, others chose to travel anyway.
On the day before Thanksgiving, typically one of the busiest travel days of the year in the United States, more than 1.07 million people passed through US airports – the most of any single day since the start of the pandemic, according to the Transportation Security Administration.
Nearly six million Americans traveled by air in the week leading up to Thanksgiving, the TSA said, a number that is however less than half that of the same period last year.
While it will take weeks for the holiday fallout to become clear, the numbers in many states are already concerning.
Thirty states posted record daily new cases in the days before Thanksgiving and 16 reported record seven-day averages for new cases on Thursday and Friday. Those 16 are: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Kansas, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Washington and West Virginia.
The seven-day rolling average for US deaths is currently just over 1,400 and the average for daily infections is just shy of 160,400.
Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warned on Sunday that the US could experience ‘a surge superimposed upon that surge that we’re already in’ as a result of people ignoring guidance about Thanksgiving gatherings.
But Fauci emphasized that ‘it’s not too late to do something about this’, urging people to be careful as they travel back home and adhere to quarantine guidelines.
He said he expects vaccines to be rolled out by the end of December, which could help curb the spread of the virus as well.
‘If we can hang together as a country and do these kinds of things to blunt these surges until we get a substantial proportion of the population vaccinated, we can get through this,’ Fauci told Meet The Press.
‘There really is light at the end of the tunnel.’
Dr Deborah Birx, a leading member of the White House coronavirus task force, also stressed the importance of post-holiday precautions on Sunday.
‘We know people may have made mistakes over the Thanksgiving time period,’ Birx told CBS News. ‘If you’re young and you gathered, you need to be tested about five to 10 days later. But you need to assume that you’re infected and not go near your grandparents and aunts and others without a mask.’
Birx acknowledged that coronavirus-related restrictions and rules vary across different parts of the country and called on Americans to take their health into their own hands and heed the advice of experts.
‘To every American, this is the moment to protect yourself and your family,’ she said. ‘So if your governor or your mayor isn’t doing the policies that we know are critical — masking, physical distancing, avoiding bars, avoiding crowded indoor areas — if those restrictions don’t exist in your state, you need to take it upon yourself to be restricted. You need to not go to these places. You need to protect your family now.’