Under Attack: COVID-19 Hospitalizations, Deaths Break Records

The pharmaceutical companies delivered and, eventually, the miracle of modern medicine that their vaccines for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) represent will rescue the world, it is hoped. In the meantime, though, things don’t look so good.

Yesterday, 3775 people died from COVID-19; that’s the highest single-day death total since the pandemic began, according to Johns Hopkins University. According to the COVID Tracking Project, 131,135 people were hospitalized yesterday for COVID-19, another single-day record. And the next 4 days with the highest number of hospitalizations? Well, they are the 4 days leading up to yesterday. In addition, for over a month, there have been 100,000 COVID-19 hospitalizations each day.

In the United States since the pandemic began, there have been over 21 million confirmed cases of COVID-19, while about 357,000 people have died from the disease. In the world, there have been over 86 million confirmed cases of COVID-19, while more than 1.8 million people have died from the disease.

It’s gotten so bad, that in California, non-essential surgeries have been discontinued in those sections of the state in which bed capacity in the intensive care units stands at 10% or less. In Los Angeles County, medical emergency crews have been ordered to not transport patients who have little chance of survival to hospitals. That seems to apply mostly to cardiac patients who cannot be revived on the scene.

There seems to be some problems with COVID-19 vaccine uptake as well. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) tracks the rate of vaccinations. And the CDC says that that vaccination rate is slowing down. As of yesterday, about 4.8 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered out of the 17 million doses distributed. In other words, 28% of the vaccines were given yesterday. On Monday, the rate was 30%. Over the weekend, it was 33%.

Long-term care facilities such as nursing homes have been a nexus of COVID-19 infection since the beginning of the pandemic. According to the CDC, just 13% of the approximately 3.3 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines distributed to long-term care facilities have been administered.

Meanwhile, questions mount concerning just how the pandemic started. The World Health Organization (WHO) yesterday sent a team of scientists to China, where the pandemic originated, to find out. Unfortunately, China would not let those scientists into the country even though China previously said it would. The WHO and Chinese officials are back to negotiating ground rules for the scientific investigation.

Earlier this week, New York magazine published a lengthy article that speculates that COVID-19 might have been home-grown in a laboratory in Wuhan, China, where the virus originally surfaced. Nicholson Baker, the author of the New York magazine article, believes that scientists in a laboratory in China purposely created a hyper-virulent strain of a coronavirus as part of an anti-pandemic program. Wuhan does have two laboratories that study coronavirus in bats.