U.S. Prepares For Worst Four Months Of The Pandemic As It Stares Down The ‘Darkest’ Days Yet

Ohio has had an “unprecedented spike” in Covid-19 hospital admissions. ICU beds in Tulsa, Oklahoma, are full. North Dakota’s hospitals don’t have enough doctors and nurses. And hospital administrators in Iowa are warning that they are approaching their limits.

The U.S. is heading for a “dark winter,” a “Covid hell,” the “darkest days of the pandemic.” However you describe it, the next few months of the coronavirus pandemic will be unlike anything the nation has seen yet.

Even as drug manufacturers make progress on a vaccine and treatments, epidemiologists, scientists and public health officials are warning that the United States has yet to see the most difficult days of the outbreak. Those are projected to come over the next three to four months.

“What America has to understand is that we are about to enter Covid hell,” Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center of Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said in an interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Alley” on Monday, hours after Pfizer announced promising news about its vaccine. “It is happening.”

Osterholm, who was appointed to President-elect Joe Biden’s coronavirus advisory board, correctly predicted months ago that there would be an “astronomical” increase in new cases after Labor Day. He now says “this number is going to continue to increase substantially.”

“We have not even come close to the peak and, as such, our hospitals are now being overrun,” Osterholm said. “The next three to four months are going to be, by far, the darkest of the pandemic.”

The U.S. is now reporting an average of more than 120,000 new Covid-19 cases a day — a staggering number that sets a deadly tone heading into the holiday season, medical experts say. The sheer volume of new cases cannot be explained by increased testing alone, because daily new cases are outpacing the rise in testing, health officials acknowledge.

Cases are also rising at a faster pace, with a roughly 33% jump in the seven-day average over the past week, according to a CNBC analysis of data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. The number of people currently hospitalized across the U.S. also stands at record 61,964, according to the COVID Tracking Project, which is run by journalists at The Atlantic.

‘Worst days ahead’
The approaching holidays set the country up for a lethal winter and spring since hospitalizations and deaths lag newly diagnosed infections by a few weeks, said Dr. Isaac Bogoch, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Toronto.

“The upcoming holidays of Thanksgiving, Diwali, Christmas, Hanukkah and New Year’s create the potential for innumerable super-spreading events across the country,” he said. “This has the potential to introduce and reintroduce the virus to new areas and to further exacerbate community transmission.”

More lives will be lost in December than the U.S. saw in March and April, said Ali Mokdad, a professor of global health at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. The country was reporting around 20,000 to 30,000 new cases and more than 2,000 deaths a day this spring.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is also warning that daily deaths are on the rise. It says “newly reported COVID-19 deaths will likely increase over the next four weeks, with 4,600 to 11,000 new deaths likely to be reported in the week ending” Nov. 28.

Based on current trends, Mokdad’s forecasting team, which has provided Covid-19 projections for the White House, estimates that the country will see more than 2,100 Covid deaths per day this winter. That figure could change if more restrictions are put in place to curb the spread of the virus or if state and local officials ease up.

‘Take over hospitals’
“Unfortunately, the worst days are ahead of us,” Mokdad said. “We are starting from a worse position, because we didn’t do a good job in the summer to bring it down and then we see right now a rapid rise in cases, so the surge of fall and winter has started. That’s why the worst days are ahead of us.”

To be sure, the U.S. has more tools to fight the virus than ever before. Pfizer and BioNTech released early data from their late-stage vaccine trial on Monday that indicated it was more than 90% effective. If authorized, the vaccine could be available to a limited number of people as early as December, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Pfizer said it can make enough doses of its two-dose vaccine to immunize about 25 million out of roughly 331 million Americans before the end of the year.

– CNBC