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- Michael Osterholm, a member of President-elect Joe Biden’s newly minted COVID-19 Advisory Board, says hitting 200,000 new cases a day is possible.
- Hospitalizations are also on the rise, an indicator usually signaling severe outcomes in cases.
Less than one week after the U.S. hit another grim milestone in the COVID-19 pandemic — where the country recorded more thans 100,000 new daily cases — experts warn that things stand to get worse.
Speaking to CNN Tuesday, Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota and a member of President-elect Joe Biden’s Transition COVID-19 Advisory Board, made a grim prediction.
“We are watching cases increase substantially in this country far beyond, I think, what most people ever thought could happen,” he said. “It will not surprise me if in the next weeks we see over 200,000 new cases a day.”
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State data indicates that as a nation, the U.S. has seen a 64 percent increase in new reported cases over the past two weeks. This contributed to the approximate 10.1 million confirmed cases seen so far over the course of the entire pandemic in the U.S. alone.
Many states are leading the U.S. in new cases, such as North and South Dakota, Iowa, Nebraska, Alaska, West Virginia, New Mexico, and others are also seeing rapid surges in hospitalizations as well.
In addition to this bleak indication, data suggests at least an 18 percent increase in deaths associated with infections. Sources like The COVID Tracking Project state that approximately 59,000 Americans are hospitalized with the virus.
While infections are surging across multiple states, two drug companies have made strides in the race to a vaccine. On Monday, Pfizer announced promising data coming out of clinical trials, and Novavax stated that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration put its vaccine candidate on a fast-track road to approval.
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