Fears of coronavirus jump intensify in Thanksgiving’s aftermath

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Sun, 2020-11-29 10:40 — mike kraft

Fears of coronavirus jump intensify in Thanksgiving’s aftermath Across the country, officials and health experts are bracing for “a surge on top of a surge.” Sarah Kaplan Washington Post

At a rural health system in Wisconsin, officials and medical experts began drawing up protocols for the once unthinkable practice of deciding which patients should get care. The chief quality officer of a major New York hospital network double- and triple-checked his system’s stockpile of emergency equipment, grimly recalling the last time he had to count how many ventilators he had left. In Arizona, a battle-weary doctor watched in horror as people flooded airports and flocked to stores for Black Friday sales, knowing it was only a matter of time before some of them wound up in his emergency room.

Days after millions of Americans ignored health guidance to avoid travel and large Thanksgiving gatherings, it’s still too soon to tell how many people became infected with the coronavirus over the course of the holiday weekend. But as travelers head home to communities already hit hard by the disease, hospitals and health officials across the country are bracing for what scientist Dave O’Connor called “a surge on top of a surge.”

“It is painful to watch,” said O’Connor, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “Like seeing two trains in the distance and knowing they’re about to crash, but you can’t do anything to stop it.” ...

The nation has already notched several bleak milestones over the holiday weekend. On Thanksgiving Day, hospitalizations in the United States exceeded 90,000 people for the first time. The following day, the country hit 13 million cases. At least nine states have seen 1 in every 1,000 residents die of the coronavirus. ...

On Friday, members of the University of Arizona coronavirus modeling team issued an urgent warning to state health officials, projecting that the state will exceed ICU capacity by the beginning of December. ...

Arizona has no statewide mask mandate, and businesses in many parts of the state, including indoor dining at restaurants, remain open. ...

ALSO SEE: More than 91,000 people -- the most of the pandemic -- are hospitalized with coronavirus in the US

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