U.S. fights coronavirus surge amid record number of new cases
The number of confirmed coronavirus cases worldwide topped 47 million on Tuesday and the global death toll is more than 1.2 million, according to figures from Johns Hopkins University. The U.S. leads the world by far in both infections and deaths, and many states are now seeing record numbers of new cases.
Americans went to the polls on Election Day in the shadow of the pandemic — a reminder of what's at stake. Anything workers and voters could touch was wiped down and sanitized.
Meanwhile, Dr. Deborah Birx, a key member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, is warning the U.S. could see over 100,000 new coronavirus cases per day sometime this week.
As Americans consider holiday plans, Dr. David Reich, president of Mount Sinai Hospital, shared advice ahead of Thanksgiving. "My advice is to have a virtual Thanksgiving, as much as possible, especially for our older and others with underlying medical conditions," he said. "We just cannot have the usual indoor celebrations."
Mount Sinai Hospital just released a new study showing COVID-19 is 10 times deadlier than the 2009 swine flu pandemic.
"I think we're very worried that in the fall and winter we could have another surge in cases," said Reich. "We could find ourselves with a very high death rate again in New York like we saw in the spring."
Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, said in a blog post on Tuesday that if all Americans wore masks, more than 130,000 lives could be saved between now and March.