Coronavirus cases in the United States will likely see another surge after Thanksgiving, an emergency doctor recently said.
What’s going on?
Dr. James Phillips, chief of disaster medicine at George Washington University Hospital, told CNN he is “terrified: about what is happening during the fall.
- “We’re going to see an unprecedented surge of cases following Thanksgiving this year, and if people don’t learn from Thanksgiving, we’re going to see it after Christmas as well,” Phillips said.
Phillips wasn’t the only doctor who said cases are going to get worse. Dr. Leana Wen, a CNN medical analyst and former Baltimore Health Commissioner, recently told CNN the health care system is going to face more problems.
- “Things are going to get much, much worse.”
- “We have this firestorm of coronavirus all across the country,” Wen said. “It’s not one or two hotspots, the entire country is a hotspot of coronavirus infection.”
By the numbers:
The United States has seen more than 11.7 million coronavirus cases since the beginning of the pandemic with more than 252,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University.
What the government says
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued new guidance Thursday that advises Americans not to travel for Thanksgiving to help stop COVID-19 cases from spiking, as I wrote about for the Deseret News.
- “Travel may increase your chance of getting and spreading COVID-19. Postponing travel and staying home is the best way to protect yourself and others this year,” the CDC says.
Adm. Brett Giroir, assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services, recently told CNN the pandemic will get worse before a vaccine arrives.
- “We have had one million cases documented over the past week, our rate of rise is higher than it even was in the summer, we have hospitalizations going up 25% week over week,” he told CNN. “There are so many more cases that we have, that deaths are going up.”