U.S. deaths top 250,000; infections forecast to rise

Karen Dette, director of Good Shepherd Services, hands a portable internet hot spot to student Jovanny Mendez at West Brooklyn Community High School in Brooklyn, N.Y., on Wednesday after the school’s principal announced that the school would be closing “until further notice” because of rising cases of the coronavirus in the city. More photos at arkansasonline.com/1119covid/.
(AP/Kathy Willens)
Karen Dette, director of Good Shepherd Services, hands a portable internet hot spot to student Jovanny Mendez at West Brooklyn Community High School in Brooklyn, N.Y., on Wednesday after the school’s principal announced that the school would be closing “until further notice” because of rising cases of the coronavirus in the city. More photos at arkansasonline.com/1119covid/. (AP/Kathy Willens)

The United States passed a grim milestone Wednesday, hitting 250,000 coronavirus-related deaths, with the number expected to keep climbing as infections surge nationwide.

Experts predict that the country could soon be reporting 2,000 deaths a day or more, matching or exceeding the spring peak, and that 100,000 to 200,000 more Americans could die in the coming months.

Just how bad it gets will depend on a variety of factors, including how well preventive measures are followed and when a vaccine is introduced.

"It all depends on what we do and how we address this outbreak," said Jeffrey Shaman, a Columbia University epidemiologist who has modeled the spread of the disease. "That is going to determine how much it runs through us."

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Back in March, when the virus was still relatively new and limited mainly to a few significant pockets such as New York, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top infectious disease expert in the country, predicted that it might kill up to 240,000 Americans.

It has now passed that mark.

New vaccines may begin to have an impact next year, experts said, and for now, developments in treating the disease as well as a younger population getting infected mean that far fewer people who are admitted to hospitals are dying. Infections are also being diagnosed earlier, which helps combat it.

The deadliest day of the pandemic in the United States was April 15, when the reported daily toll hit 2,752.

There is always a lag in deaths, compared with the rate of infection and hospitalizations, and with the latter measure now hitting records every day -- 76,830 Americans were hospitalized Tuesday, according to the COVID Tracking Project -- the death toll is certain to go on rising.

By March 24, a little more than a month into the pandemic, 50,000 people had died. That number doubled to 100,000 by May 27 and added another 50,000 within two months, by July 29. Two months later, on Sept. 22, the total reached 200,000.

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Toward the end of the summer, the number of cases being reported daily in the United States eased, after a brief spike in July. But they have been soaring again since the beginning of November.

On Sept. 22, there had been somewhat more than 6.9 million total cases in the United States, according to a New York Times database. As of now, there have been more than 11.5 million.

The combination of the onset of winter, fatigue with preventive measures, holiday travel and gatherings as well as the patchwork of responses across all 50 states is expected to drive that number still higher.

"We have a lot of people who have not been infected with this yet," Shaman said. "If you get complacent, the virus does not care. It is just going to come back."

PFIZER VACCINE

On Wednesday, the drugmaker Pfizer said its coronavirus vaccine was 95% effective and had no serious side effects -- the first set of complete results from a late-stage vaccine trial as covid-19 cases skyrocket around the globe.

The data showed that the vaccine prevented mild and severe forms of covid-19, the company said. And it was 94% effective in older adults, who are more vulnerable to developing severe covid-19 and who do not respond strongly to some types of vaccines.

Pfizer, which developed the vaccine with its partner BioNTech, said the companies planned to apply to the Food and Drug Administration for emergency authorization "within days," raising hopes that a working vaccine could soon become a reality.

The trial results -- less than a year after researchers began working on the vaccine -- shattered all speed records for vaccine development, a process that usually takes years.

"The study results mark an important step in this historic eight-month journey to bring forward a vaccine capable of helping to end this devastating pandemic," Dr. Albert Bourla, Pfizer's chief executive, said in a statement.

If the FDA authorizes the two-dose vaccine, Pfizer has said that it could have up to 50 million doses available by the end of the year, and up to 1.3 billion by the end of next year.

However, only about half of its supply will go to the United States this year, or enough for about 12.5 million people -- a sliver of the U.S. population of 330 million. Americans will receive the vaccine for free, under a $1.95 billion deal the federal government reached with Pfizer for 100 million doses.

'BENEFITS CLIFF'

Separately, deadlines set by Congress early in the pandemic will result in about 12 million Americans losing unemployment insurance by the year's end, according to a report released Wednesday.

According to the report from unemployment researchers Andrew Stettner and Elizabeth Pancotti, those Americans will lose their unemployment benefits the day after Christmas -- more than half of the 21.1 million people currently on the benefits -- because of deadlines Congress chose when it passed the CARES Act in March amid optimism the pandemic would be short-lived.

Another 4.4 million people have already exhausted their benefits this year, according to Stettner and Pancotti, who wrote the report for the Century Foundation, a public policy research group.

The "benefits cliff" on Dec. 26 includes an additional 7.3 million workers on Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, the supplemental insurance for gig and self-employed workers, which ends that day, as well as 4.6 million people on Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation, the unemployment insurance extension available for people who have exhausted regular benefits after what is typically about six months, depending on the state.

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"Nobody is talking about this," Stettner said in an interview. "We're just careening into this huge cliff and it's like it's not even happening. People are just totally, completely ignoring the situation at a time when things are getting worse before they're going to get better in terms of public health. And that just really is going to constrain people's ability to get a job when benefits run out."

Some covid-19 assistance could potentially be attached to a spending bill needed to avoid a federal government shutdown, but with Congress deadlocked and a White House transition looming, the outlook for another stimulus package this year is bleak.

President Donald Trump hasn't outlined a plan to extend the aid programs via executive order and his successor Joe Biden won't take office until the second half of January.

All of this poses risks to a U.S. economy that's recovered faster than expected yet still has a long way to go, particularly with the resurgence of covid-19 cases bringing a new wave of restrictions on business. While in aggregate household finances are in great shape, the strength is uneven, with jobs still 10 million below February levels.

AROUND THE NATION

Meanwhile, New York City is shuttering schools to try to stop the renewed spread of the coronavirus, Mayor Bill de Blasio said Wednesday.

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The nation's largest public school system will halt in-person learning today, sending more than 1 million children into all-online classes at least through Thanksgiving, the Democratic mayor said at a news conference.

The city hasn't yet settled on criteria for reopening classrooms, but de Blasio said they would involve increasing virus testing of children at schools and allowing students to return only if their parents consented to that testing.

"We're going to fight this back," de Blasio said. "This is a setback, but it's a setback we will overcome."

He'd said last week that a shutdown could come within days.

Elsewhere, the largest city in South Dakota reversed course and passed a 60-day mask mandate Tuesday after enforcement was removed from the ordinance and medical groups said hospitals exceeded capacity dealing with covid-19 patients.

The Sioux Falls City Council voted 6-2 to approve the measure Tuesday night. But the council said violations of the requirement, which applies to retail businesses and public buildings, will not carry any penalty.

Sioux Falls Mayor Paul TenHaken, who cast a tie-breaking vote against a mandate last week, said before Tuesday night's vote that he was ready to get behind the requirement after the state's largest physicians' organization and a hospital system came out in support.

Councilor Greg Neitzert, who voted against the ordinance, told the audience that his "yes" votes on amendments were to make the ordinance "as weak and ineffectual as I can" in case it passed and should not have been taken as a vote of support. "I want to neuter this," he said.

He warned that the ordinance would be toothless and an empty gesture.

"We're going to put this in place, and it's not going to work," Neitzert said before the vote.

"If you're for mandates, you're not getting anything tonight. If you're against mandates, you're going to be vilified," he said.

Meanwhile, Tennessee is just one of 14 states poised to head into the holiday season without a statewide mask mandate.

Gov. Bill Lee also has vowed he will not impose business restrictions nor issue guidance on how families should gather for next week's Thanksgiving holiday amid the ongoing pandemic. The Republican has remained steadfast that he's open to all options to battling covid-19, reiterating for weeks that he hasn't ruled anything out.

However, Lee has thus far refused to adopt recommendations like other GOP governors -- most recently in hard-hit states like Iowa, North Dakota and Utah -- who have implemented some sort of limited mask requirement in the face of skyrocketing virus numbers. Lee, instead, has left the mask requirement question up to Tennessee's counties.

Lee's administration has also spent months encouraging Tennesseans to take "personal responsibility" in their actions to prevent the spread of the virus. When asked what happens if people don't heed that advice, Lee has maintained that personal responsibility is the only path to curbing the spread of the novel coronavirus.

Additionally, Lee has extended hours at various free virus testing sites ahead of Thanksgiving and directed National Guard personnel to help assist the expanded services in the more populous counties of Davidson, Knoxville and Hamilton.

"[For] now, what we believe is the strategy we are taking is actually working," Lee said during this week's virus news briefing. "It may well be working better than a statewide mask mandate would work."

In Alabama, the new coronavirus is spreading so quickly that covid-19 is rampant and there's little hope of real improvement until weeks after the holidays, despite the hope presented by new vaccines, health officials said Wednesday.

"It's out of control," said Dr. Donald Williamson, the president of the Alabama Hospital Association and former director of the state health agency.

The rolling daily average of new cases over the past two weeks has increased by 684, a jump of about 50%, according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University, and one in every 342 people in Alabama tested positive in the past week. More than 3,300 people have died since the coronavirus pandemic began, state statistics show.

While Gov. Kay Ivey has extended an order requiring face coverings in public through Dec. 11, she also lifted occupancy limits to help businesses. Bars, restaurants, stores and churches are again filling up in populated metro areas, and face masks are rarely seen in some rural locales.

With the holidays coming, officials fear large gatherings of families and friends will spread the virus even more and result in a wave of illness that won't diminish until late January at the earliest.

Information for this article was contributed by Neil MacFarquhar and Katie Thomas of The New York Times; by Eli Rosenberg and Jeff Stein of The Washington Post; by Reade Pickert and Olivia Rockeman of Bloomberg News; and by Jennifer Peltz, Karen Matthews, Marina Villeneuve, Stephen Groves, Terry Wallace, Kimberlee Kruesi and Jay Reeves of The Associated Press.

A health care professional works at a walk-up covid-19 testing site Wednesday in Miami. Florida health officials have reported a steady increase in new coronavirus cases each day over the past month and a half, though the numbers are nowhere near the peak in July.
(AP/Lynne Sladky)
A health care professional works at a walk-up covid-19 testing site Wednesday in Miami. Florida health officials have reported a steady increase in new coronavirus cases each day over the past month and a half, though the numbers are nowhere near the peak in July. (AP/Lynne Sladky)

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