“Hospitals anticipate surge of coronavirus patients after Thanksgiving weekend,” CBS News reports.
And the Thanksgiving surge could produce a Christmas surge of coronavirus infections atop the Thanksgiving surge, warns CNN. Especially since new guidance from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests most infections are spread by people with no symptoms:
“CDC and others estimate that more than 50% of all infections are transmitted from people who are not exhibiting symptoms,” it added in the guidance posted Friday.
“This means at least half of new infections come from people likely unaware they are infectious to others.”
So the fewer people together in one place the better. Please take this seriously. Many victims have no idea where they picked up the virus.
“My 24 year old niece is on blood thinners for life. She feels the effects when she misses a dose. Covid lungs for life. Life expectancy for all who get it is shortened,” tweets another respondent.
“This is why it devastates me when the kids say they’ll just get covid and be done with it. Just because you move on from covid doesn’t mean it moves on from you,” tweets yet another.
Just as creepy are the people whose first reflex is to ask if victims young or old have underlying health issues. It smacks of a kind of unconscious belief by the curious in their own genetic superiority. As if, sure, this woman may look like me, but there must have been a reason she’s in such bad shape. Because that could never happen to me.
The death count is reaching for April highs once again even though medical teams know more now about how to fight it:
Yet the sheer breadth of the current outbreak means that the cost in lives lost every day is still climbing. More than 170,000 Americans are now testing positive for the virus on an average day, straining hospitals across much of the country, including in many states that had seemed to avoid the worst of the pandemic. More than 1.1 million people tested positive in the past week alone.
At the peak of the spring wave in April, about 31,000 new cases were announced each day, though that was a vast undercount because testing capacity was extremely limited. Still, the toll of the virus was an abstraction for many Americans because deaths were concentrated in a handful of states like New York, New Jersey and Louisiana.
It is still an abstraction for many. It is strange to think how paranoid we were in April. How cautious we were about masks and disinfectants, wiping down doorknobs and groceries and so forth. That was when so much was unknown about COVID-19 and New York City was burying bodies in mass graves. Over six months later, we have let down our guards and the virus is back to spring levels and hospitals are straining to keep up. Like normalizing mass shootings and Trump’s lies, we have come to shrug off the deaths and injuries as long as they are some other family’s.
Christmas around here is going to resemble Thanksgiving. Quiet. Small. Private. Baking will have to substitute for the annual family gathering.
Please consider it. A friend lost her grandfather this morning to COVID.