Biden to formally introduce cabinet picks as transition finally begins – live |

Jerome Adams, surgeon general, further warned this morning : “A quarter of all of our coronavirus cases this year have occurred in the last month.”

The US is approaching 12.5 million coronavirus cases and has witnessed almost 258,000 deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins University coronavirus resource center in Baltimore. These are by a significant margin the highest totals in the world.

Appearing on Fox News this morning, Adams said of the surge in infections in the last month that: “Those cases are turning into hospitalizations and deaths.”

On a national level, the United States has not brought the coronavirus under control during the entire time the country has been directly affected by the disease, since January. Experts acknowledge that it is spreading like wildfire across much of the US in the autumn surge. And Adams further warned that hospitals under strain will be forced to turn away heart patients, pregnant women and others.

“That’s the reality,” he said.

Hospitals need immediate relief, Reuters reports.

The United States was on pace to surpass 85,000 hospitalizations for Covid-19 on Wednesday, a record.

That has taxed already exhausted healthcare providers as more than 1,500 coronavirus deaths and 171,000 new cases pile up daily.

Many Midwestern hospitals, in particular, severely lack beds, equipment and clinical staff, providers say.

Some are repurposing areas to accommodate Covid-19 patients or cramming multiple patients in a single room, and are asking staffers to work longer hours and more frequent shifts.
“There’s a disconnect in the community, where we’re seeing people at bars and restaurants, or planning Thanksgiving dinners,” said Dr. Kelly Cawcutt, an infectious disease physician at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. As health workers, she said, “we feel kind of dejected.”