US Coronavirus: Nearly 60,000 Americans could die of Covid-19 in the next 3 weeks. There are ways to turn things around, experts say

“So, we’ll be seeing close to 4,000 deaths a day, which is how you get another 60,000 deaths in only about 20 days,” Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a professor of medicine at George Washington University, said Wednesday.

“In a week, more likely two weeks, we will see a surge upon a surge,” Dr. William Schaffner, professor of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University, said Wednesday. “We’re in for a tough time.”

Statistics reported in the days right after the holiday will likely show a relative dip in Covid-19 case numbers, followed by a surge. This reflects government agencies’ lag in reporting over the long weekend. And given coronavirus’ incubation time and how long it takes someone to test positive, cases related to Thanksgiving are unlikely to showing in public data until the first full week of December at the earliest.

Projections for the coming weeks may be grim, but it’s not too late for a turnaround.

“It we all got together, wore the masks and did the social distancing, we could bend this curve within two or three weeks,” Schaffner said. “We would see actually transmission go down even before we get to the vaccines.”

What it would take to turn the tide

While a possible vaccine candidate could soon get the green light, widespread effects of a vaccine are months away. Still, Americans right now have valuable tools that can help.

They are the safety measures touted by officials for months — face masks, social distancing, avoiding crowds and practicing good hygiene, like regular hand washing.

In West Virginia, Gov. Jim Justice has pleaded with residents in recent weeks to wear face coverings, saying masks are “really the only bullet in the gun.”

“If you’re inconvenienced, if you don’t believe in it, please wear it … what’s the downside,” Justice said in a news conference this week. “Look, we’re not one to take anybody’s rights. My good lord, I get it wholeheartedly, we don’t want to do that in any way. But you gotta help me.”

It’s the kind of message that needs to be echoed by local leaders across the country, Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of tropical medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine, told CNN Thursday morning.

“Keep saying it every day and hope that some people actually start to believe it. That’s our only hope at this point. We’ve got to limit those surges, and we need those local leaders to really step up, so this is absolutely vital,” he said.

The hope is to help keep more people alive until a vaccine, he said.

“It’s a matter of keeping your mother, your father, your brother, your sister alive between now and then,” Hotez added. “If we could just get those messages out.”

FDA could authorize vaccine weeks after December meeting

The message is crucial since a US Food and Drug Administration decision authorizing Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine may not come until a few weeks after a meeting scheduled for December 10, according to an agency official.

President Donald Trump on Thursday said vaccine deliveries will start “in the next week or the week after,” but the director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research a day earlier offered a vastly different time frame.

“It will be a matter of weeks. It could be from days to weeks” after the December 10 meeting, according to Dr. Peter Marks.

“I can’t give you an exact date that we’re going to have an emergency use authorization issued because we have to do it right,” the FDA official said Wednesday.

Vaccinations will begin in the US “towards the latter part of December,” according to Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Florida extends ban on cities’ restrictions

Despite the uncertain schedule for a vaccine, masks remain a point of contention in many parts of the US.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis extended an order this week that bans municipalities from issuing fines for violations of pandemic-related rules — like mask mandates — or limiting restaurant capacity without justification.

“It’s deeply frustrating that @GovRonDeSantis continues to block local actions and make it harder for local leaders to keep our communities safe,” Cava wrote.

“I’m asking the governor to work with local mayors so we can bring our local knowledge to the table,” Cava added. “We need to work together to create policies that will protect all our families and our economy in this moment of crisis.

In the past week, Florida has reported more than 56,400 new infections and more than 520 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University data.

CNN has reached out to DeSantis’s office for comment.

Only 1 in 8 US Covid-19 cases may have been counted

In total, more than 12.8 million Americans have tested positive for the virus since the pandemic’s start. But a new study suggests that could only be a small fraction of the true number of infections in the US.

Only about 1 in 8 — or 13% — all of Covid-19 infections in the country were recognized and reported through the end of September, researchers at the CDC estimate. That means as many as 53 million people in the US could have been infected from February through September — yet during that time, only about 7 million confirmed cases of symptomatic Covid-19 were reported nationally, the researchers noted.

To estimate the number of Covid-19 cases that may have been missed since the beginning of the pandemic, the researchers used a model to adjust the reported numbers of symptomatic cases in the US. They considered what’s known about detecting cases, asymptomatic infections, patients seeking care or not and the risk of false negative test results.

The study’s limitations included that the availability and use of testing has changed over time and their findings serve only as estimates.

While the numbers may seem large, the researchers wrote that, still “this indicates that approximately 84% of the US population has not yet been infected and thus most of the country remains at risk, despite already high rates of hospitalization.”