Dark days: Experts fear the holidays will fuel US COVID crisis

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Hard-hit California eclipsed two million coronavirus cases on Christmas Eve as the US headed into a holiday season of travel and family gatherings that threaten to fuel the deadly outbreak across the nation.

Despite warnings from public health experts to stay home, over 1.19 million travellers passed through US airport security checkpoints Wednesday — down by about 40% from a year ago, but the highest one-day total since the crisis took hold in mid-March.

Airports also recorded around 1 million travellers on each of the five days between last Friday and Tuesday.

Ember McCauley, a 21-year-old nursing student at Missouri Western in St Joseph, was headed Tuesday from Kansas City, Missouri, to Austin, Texas, to go wedding dress shopping with a cousin, who is getting married in November.

She was returning home on Christmas Eve.

She said she was “kind of” anxious about travelling during the pandemic.

But she added: “I feel like I eat healthily and I take a lot of precautions, like sanitising and washing my hands and wearing my mask all the time. I feel like I will be OK, even if something does happen.”

Dr Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious-disease expert, said he is particularly worried about travel between Christmas and New Year’s.

Fauci, who turned 80 on Thursday, said he and his wife would be celebrating his birthday and the holidays with their children on Zoom.

“We have a big problem,” Fauci told The Washington Post. “Look at the numbers — the numbers are really quite dramatic.”

The virus has taken more than 327,000 lives in the U.S., with over 3,000 deaths per day repeatedly recorded over the past two weeks.

“We’re in a very very difficult situation right now. People are just not paying attention to public health guidelines, and the evidence for that is in the number of people travelling for the Christmas holiday,” said Dr. Lee Harrison, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh.

Americans have high hopes for vaccines — officials had promised that some 20 million people would be vaccinated by year’s end. But as of Wednesday, about 1.1 million Americans had received the first dose of the two-dose inoculations, yet another disappointment in a year of many.

On Thursday, California became the first state to record two million confirmed coronavirus infections, reaching the milestone on Christmas Eve as close to the entire state was under a strict stay-at-home order and hospitals struggled to cope with the biggest crush of cases since the pandemic began.

The first COVID-19 case in California was confirmed on January 25.

It took 292 days to reach 1 million cases on November 11.

It took 44 days to get to the next million.

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