ORANGE, Calif. -- The U.S. topped 4,000 coronavirus deaths in a single day for the first time, breaking a record set just one day earlier, as governors tried to ramp up the pace of vaccinations and open the line to elderly people and others.
The tally from Johns Hopkins University showed the nation had 4,085 deaths Thursday, along with nearly 275,000 new cases of the virus -- evidence that the crisis is growing worse after family gatherings and travel over the holidays and the onset of winter, which is forcing people indoors.
Since Monday, the United States has recorded 13,500 deaths -- more than Pearl Harbor, D-Day, 9/11 and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake combined.
Overall, the scourge has left more than 368,000 people dead in the U.S. and caused nearly 22 million confirmed infections. More than 132,000 people nationwide are hospitalized with covid-19.
President-elect Joe Biden's transition team said Friday that he plans to release nearly all available coronavirus vaccine doses "to ensure the Americans who need it most get it as soon as possible," a move that represents a sharp break from the Trump administration's practice of holding back some of the vaccine for second doses.
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The announcement coincided with a letter from eight Democratic governors -- including Andrew Cuomo of New York and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, both of whom have clashed with President Donald Trump -- imploring the current administration to release all available doses to the states as soon as possible.
"The failure to distribute these doses to states who request them is unconscionable and unacceptable," the governors wrote in the letter, which was obtained by The New York Times and sent Friday to Secretary of Health Alex Azar and Gen. Gustave Perna, who is in charge of vaccine distribution. "We demand that the federal government begin distributing these reserved doses to states immediately," the letter said.
"The president-elect believes we must accelerate distribution of the vaccine while continuing to ensure the Americans who need it most get it as soon as possible," a Biden transition spokesman, T.J. Ducklo, said in a statement. "He believes the government should stop holding back vaccine supply so we can get more shots in Americans' arms now."
The statement also said Biden plans to provide additional details next week "on how his administration will begin releasing available doses" when he takes office Jan. 20.
Because both of the vaccines with emergency approval require two doses, the Trump administration has been holding back roughly half of its supply to ensure those already vaccinated receive the booster dose. The vaccine rollout has been troubled from the start.
As of Thursday, the Trump administration had shipped more than 21 million vaccine doses, and millions more were already in the federal government's hands.
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Biden has promised that 100 million doses would be administered by his 100th day in office.
Releasing the vast majority of the vaccine doses raises the risk that second doses would not be administered on time. Officials with the Food and Drug Administration -- experts whose advice Biden has pledged to follow -- have spoken out strongly against changing the dosing schedule, calling such a move "premature and not rooted solidly in the available evidence."
The number of Americans who have gotten their first shot of the covid-19 vaccine climbed to almost 6.7 million Friday, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a robust, one-day gain of about 800,000 after a slow start to the campaign.
The goal ultimately is to vaccinate hundreds of millions in the U.S., though health care workers and nursing home residents are getting priority in most places for now.
Faced with mounting criticism over the sluggish rollout, Cuomo announced Friday that starting next week, New York will allow a much wider swath of the public to get inoculated, including anyone 75 or older, teachers and first responders. New Mexico is likewise expanding eligibility to the elderly as well as people with certain underlying medical conditions.
In Arizona, a vaccination site will open Monday at the suburban Phoenix stadium where the NFL's Arizona Cardinals play. State officials said it will be capable of vaccinating thousands of people each day. Oregon plans to dispense thousands of shots at the state fairgrounds in Salem this weekend with help from the National Guard.
In Utah, newly installed Gov. Spencer Cox unveiled a plan aimed at increasing the number of shots administered to 50,000 a week. He said he will issue an executive order requiring facilities to allocate their doses the week they are received.
"This virus does not sleep," Cox said. "This virus does not take weekends off. And neither should we."
SUN BELT HIT HARD
The lethal surge is being driven in large part by Sun Belt states. California, Arizona, Texas and Florida together had nearly 1,500 deaths and 80,000 cases Thursday and have been setting daily records this week, as have Mississippi and Nevada.
Many hospitals in Los Angeles and other hard-hit areas are struggling to keep up and warned they may need to ration lifesaving care. Nurses are caring for more sick people than typically allowed under the law after the state began issuing waivers to the strict nurse-to-patient ratios.
At Los Angeles County's Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital in Valencia, nurse Nerissa Black said the place is swamped with patients, likening the situation to New York's at the beginning of the pandemic.
She was assigned six patients and could spend only about 10 minutes with each of them per hour, including the time it takes for her to change her protective gear.
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"It's very hard to decide which one should I go see first: the patient who has chest pain or the patient whose oxygen level is dropping," she said.
At St. Joseph Hospital south of Los Angeles, nurses in the covid-19 ward described being overwhelmed as the deaths mount.
"Just today we had two deaths on this unit. And that's pretty much the norm," said Caroline Brandenburger. "I usually see one to two every shift. Super sad." She added: "They fight every day, and they struggle to breathe every day even with tons of oxygen. And then you just see them die. They just die."
Active-duty military medical personnel were dispatched to a Southern California hospital overwhelmed with covid-19 patients.
About 20 physician assistants, nurses and respiratory care practitioners from the Army and Air Force were sent to Riverside University Health System-Medical Center in response to a state request to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The 439-bed hospital normally averages 350 patients, but that is now up to 450.
The outbreak has taken another turn for the worse in Arizona, with the state now leading the nation with the highest covid-19 diagnosis rate. Since Dec. 31, one in every 111 Arizonans has been diagnosed with the virus.
VACCINE WORKS AGAINST VARIANT
New research suggests Pfizer's covid-19 vaccine can protect against a mutation found in the two more-contagious variants of the coronavirus initially found in Britain and South Africa.
The study was preliminary and did not look at the two other major vaccines being used in the West -- Moderna's and AstraZeneca's. But it was reassuring, given questions of whether the virus could mutate to defeat the shots on which the world has pinned its hopes.
"There's no reason to think the vaccines won't work just as well on these strains," said Dr. Frederic Bushman of the University of Pennsylvania, who tracks how the virus mutates.
The mutated version circulating in Britain has also been detected in the U.S. and numerous other countries. That and the variant seen in South Africa are causing global concern because they appear to spread more easily -- although how much more isn't yet known.
Bushman, who wasn't involved with the Pfizer study, cautioned that it tested just one vaccine against one worrisome mutation. But the Moderna and AstraZeneca vaccines are undergoing similar testing, and he said he expects similar findings.
That's because all the vaccines so far are prompting recipients' bodies to make antibodies against multiple spots on the spike protein that coats the virus.
"A mutation will change one little place, but it's not going to disrupt binding to all of them," Bushman said.
While scientists did not expect that a single mutation would completely upend efforts to stop the pandemic, it is still an important area of study because this coronavirus, like all viruses, constantly evolves. This study marks just the beginning of continual monitoring to make sure that all the vaccines being rolled out around the world continue to work.
Information for this article was contributed by Eugene Garcia, Lisa Marie Pane, Thalia Beaty and Lauran Neergaard of The Associated Press; by Amy Goldstein of The Washington Post; and by Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Katherine J. Wu, Michael Crowley and Karen Zraick of The New York Times.
