The United States of America has endured yet another tragic day with the pandemic. John Hopkins University reported that 3,725 people died from the virus on Tuesday. Yesterday's death toll tops the country's previous high of 3,656 deaths on December 16. Over the course of the pandemic, America has endured 338,656 total deaths.
While daily death tolls continue to rise during the pandemic, hospitalizations and positive test results continue to rise as well. More than 100,000 people have been hospitalized each day during the month of December. Most recently, Texas shattered its state record with nearly 30,000 new COVID-19 cases and 12,000 coronavirus related hospitalizations in one day. The Longhorn State has seen its positivity rate hold over 15% for an entire week.
“If the positivity test rate is more than 10 percent, that’s one of those red flags that we begin to look at,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott said.
Overall, the state has seen more than 1.6 million coronavirus cases and 28,000 deaths. Across the country, nearly 20 million have been infected with the virus and millions more hospitalized.
Despite the introduction of the vaccine, health officials are worried that the pandemic will only get worse as the winter charges ahead.
“I think we just have to assume that it’s going to get worse,” Dr. Anthony Fauci said.
“I hope we don’t just get to that level of continually seeing over 200,000 [hospitalizations] because, as you know, it staggers. You get cases, you get hospitalizations and then you get deaths. It’s highly predictable that once you increase in those number of cases in a staggered way every couple of weeks, you get an increase in the number of hospitalizations.”
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