US coronavirus deaths hit record levels with the holidays ahead

Deaths from COVID-19 in the United States have soared to more than 2,200 a day on average, matching the frightening peak reached last April, and cases per day have eclipsed 200,000 on average for the first time on record, with the crisis all but certain to get worse because of the fallout from Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s.

Virtually every state is reporting surges just as a vaccine appears days away from getting the go-ahead in the US.

“What we do now literally will be a matter of life and death for many of our citizens,” Washington Governor Jay Inslee said Tuesday as he extended restrictions on businesses and social gatherings, including a ban on indoor dining and drinking at restaurants and bars.

While the impending arrival of the vaccine is reason for hope, he said, “at the moment, we have to face reality, and the reality is that we are suffering a very dire situation with the pandemic.”

The virus is blamed for more than 280,000 deaths and almost 15 million confirmed infections in the United States.

Many Americans disregarded warnings not to travel over Thanksgiving and have ignored other safety precautions, whether out of stubbornness, ignorance or complacency.

On Saturday night, police in Southern California arrested nearly 160 people at an illegal party in Palmdale.

Before his death Friday from complications of COVID-19, 78-year-old former Alabama state Senator Larry Dixon asked his wife from his hospital bed to relay a warning.

“Sweetheart, we messed up. We just dropped our guard. ... We’ve got to tell people this is real,” his friend Dr David Thrasher, a pulmonologist, quoted him as saying.

Although Dixon had been conscientious about masks and social distancing, he met up with friends at a restaurant for what they called a “prayer meeting,” and three of them fell ill, Thrasher said.

Dr Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus task force coordinator, offered what sounded like a subtle rebuke of the way President Donald Trump and others in the administration have downplayed the disease and undercut scientists.

“Messages need to be critically consistent,” Birx said Tuesday at a Wall Street Journal conference of CEOs.

“I think we need to be much more consistent about addressing the myths that are out there — that COVID doesn’t really exist, or that the fatalities somehow are made up, or the hospitalisations are for other diseases, not COVID, that masks actually hurt you.”

On Thursday, a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel is widely expected to authorise emergency use of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, and shots could begin almost immediately after that.

Britain on Tuesday started dispensing the Pfizer vaccine, becoming the first country in the West to begin mass vaccinations.

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