More than half of the country is now “at a tipping point” for Covid-19, according to the risk-assessment map run by the Harvard Global Health Institute and Brown School of Public Wellbeing. The monitoring software offers every county a score of green, yellow, orange, or red, based upon the variety of new daily cases of Covid-19 per 100,000 individuals over a seven-day rolling common.
Each red county on the map is at high threat, having recorded 25 or more new positive Covid-19 cases on daily basis per 100,000 people. That level of spread is difficult to control with no circuit-breaking intervention such as a stay-at-home order, based on the Harvard and Brown researchers.
With Covid-19 now spreading in the U.S. faster than at any time during the pandemic, it has to become far more challenging to plan a safe getaway this fall.
The current Covid-19 increase is often described as a surge or wave, but “the metaphor of metaphor of a wildfire is probably higher,” William Hanage, an affiliate professor of epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan Faculty of Public Well being, told NBC News final week. “It’s undeniable that the U.S. is now seeing a pretty widespread transmission across the board.”
It isn’t just that key metrics are going in the wrong path, but how quickly they are spiraling uncontrolled. Contemplate that the number of states at high threat, per the Harvard-Brown tracker, has soared from 10 to 26 in just 4 weeks.
An equally concerning metric is the uptick in the Covid-19 positivity rate. Public well-being experts say {that a} rising positivity fee — the percentage of exams that are constructive — is the best predictor of what is to come.
“It’s a clear indication that you are getting an uptick in circumstances, which inevitably results in surges, and then you definitely get hospitalizations, and then you get deaths,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, told CNN in August. As of now, 33 states — a full two-thirds of the country
We’re at the moment in the early levels of the third and largest surge of the pandemic. The influential model from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) on the University of Washington School of Medicine projects this surge might be longer and deadlier than the first two, not reaching its peak till mid-January. By February 1, 2021, the sickness is expected to have claimed nearly 400,000 American lives.
Looking ahead in the subsequent few weeks, public health experts are increasingly involved with those planning to visit friends and family over Thanksgiving weekend, normally one of the busiest journey intervals of the year.
The recently issued detailed guidance for Thanksgiving from the Facilities for Disease Control and Prevention deems “attending massive indoor gatherings with people from the exterior of your household” to be a high threat. In addition, a growing number of state governors are now urging residents to nix their Thanksgiving travel plans.
However, there’s good reason to believe that many individuals will not heed these warnings. Domestic air travel has ticked up since Labor Day, as Covid-19 cases have risen throughout the nation. Final month, the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) screened greater than 900,000 passengers on simply two days, each throughout Labor Day weekend, according to the agency’s throughput data. The TSA hit that milestone on 12 days in October, including one day the place the number of screened passengers topped one million.
