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With just days until the Thanksgiving holiday, coronavirus cases are rising across the US at staggering rates.
The US yesterday topped 12 million cases of the virus since the pandemic began — and more than 3 million of those cases have been in November alone, and the month is more than a week from being over.
If you’re reading in now, here the latest on the pandemic in the US:
The US has reported more than 100,000 new Covid-19 cases daily for the last 20 days, according to Johns Hopkins University data.
An additional 101,387 new cases and 672 new deaths were reported as of 4 p.m. ET Sunday, for a total of 12,189,797 cases and 256,533 deaths since the pandemic began.
In the month of November, the US has reported an additional 3,065,803 cases as of 4 p.m. EST Sunday, accounting for more than a quarter, 25.15%, of all cases since the pandemic began.
There have been 25,410 deaths so far reported in the month of November. That accounts for 9.9% of deaths during the pandemic. The United States has reported more than 1,000 deaths in the month of November in 15 out of the 22 days so far.
Tennessee health officials reported 4,589 new Covid-19 cases and 55 deaths on Sunday, according to the Tennessee Department of Health (DOH).
DOH reported a 12.54% positivity rate for Sunday.
Gov. Bill Lee said in a tweet Sunday that operating hours will be extended at 35 county health departments on Monday “to provide additional COVID-19 testing options to Tennesseans before Thanksgiving.”
There are at least 340,476 total coronavirus cases in the state, according to DOH.
There have been a total of 4,266 deaths in Tennessee linked to the virus, DOH reports.
One thing to note: These numbers were released by the state’s public health agency and may not line up exactly in real time with CNN’s database drawn from Johns Hopkins University and the Covid Tracking Project.
The US is in the middle of an unprecedented pandemic resurgence. The country reported more than three million new Covid-19 so far this month — and there’s still more than a week left before November is over.
As Americans prepare to celebrate Thanksgiving next week, here’s a refresher on the basics of how to protect yourself and those you love:
Read more on how to protect yourself and your loved ones here.
The Illinois Department of Public Health reported 10,012 new cases of Covid-19 Sunday, a day after it reported an all-time high for hospitalizations.
On Saturday, the department reported 6,175 Covid-19 patients hospitalized. That number has now decreased to 6,072 patients, according to a press release issued by the agency Sunday.
Of those patients, 1,179 were in the ICU and 589 were on ventilators, the release said.
The release said 76 additional deaths were also reported for a total of 11,506 Covid-19 deaths statewide since the pandemic began.
A total of 656,298 cases have been reported statewide, according to the release.
Sen. Kelly Loeffler’s campaign says the Georgia Republican’s Covid-19 test has come back negative.
Lawson added that, “out of an abundance of caution, (Loeffler) will continue to self-isolate and be retested again to hopefully receive consecutive negative test results. We will share those results as they are made available. She will continue to confer with medical experts and follow CDC guidelines.”
As CNN reported Saturday, Loeffler’s campaign confirmed that the Georgia Republican tested positive for the coronavirus on Friday but a subsequent test came back as inconclusive on Saturday evening.
Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration and a board member of Pfizer, told CBS’s Margaret Brennan on Sunday that his guess is that a Covid-19 vaccine will be annual until more is learned.
“We don’t know yet,” Gottlieb told Brennan when she asked whether people would have to go back and get the vaccine every year.
Gottlieb said that there is some data that suggests “the immunity is fairly durable and might last longer than a year, but we just don’t know that yet.”
He added that this probably wouldn’t be known at the time a vaccine gets authorized either, “so my guess is it’s going to be an annual vaccination for a period of time until we learn more.”
Gottlieb also spoke about the safety profile of the vaccine, saying “the safety profile has been good in the clinical trials.”
Most vaccine related adverse events happened in the first 40 days or two months of vaccination, he said.
“But, we’re not going to know the full profile until you have that long term follow up data,” which is why the FDA is taking what he called a prudent approach and probably won’t generally license the vaccine until they have six or eight months of long term follow up data on trial participants who were vaccinated and people who are vaccinated in the next several months.
The United States has reported more than three million new Covid-19 cases this month as of 1 p.m. EST Sunday, according to Johns Hopkins University data. There’s still more than a week left before November is over.
Here’s the full breakdown of cases per month in the US:
The United States has reported more than 3 million new Covid-19 cases in November as of 1 p.m. EST Sunday, according to Johns Hopkins University data.
There have also been at least 25,040 deaths from the virus in November as of Sunday afternoon.
Since November began, an additional 3,002,082 cases have been identified.
There have now been a total of 12,126,076 coronavirus cases and 256,163 deaths throughout the US.
November’s new cases account for 24.75% of all cases in the US since the pandemic began and the month’s death count accounts for 9.7% of all Covid-19 deaths in the US.
The California Department of Public Health (CDPH) reported the second highest daily coronavirus case count on Saturday, recording 14,319 cases. On Friday CDPH reported 15,442 new Covid-19 cases.
The number of new daily coronavirus cases has nearly tripled since numbers reported in the beginning of the month of November.
There are currently 1,102,033 confirmed coronavirus cases in California to date, according to a numbers released by CDPH on Saturday.
A limited “Stay At Home” order issued by Gov. Gavin Newsom was met with varying reaction across California’s 58 counties. It’s the first time since March that a statewide “Stay At Home Order” was put in place in an effort to reduce the spread of coronavirus across the state.
People in Orange County gathered at Huntington Beach on Saturday night in defiance of Newsom’s new order, protesting the month-long overnight curfew.
New York State is reporting 5,391 new cases of Covid-19, Gov. Andrew Cuomo tweeted today.
The overall statewide test positivity rate is 2.74%, and within the cluster zones, the positivity rate is 4.39%.
On Sunday, the state reported at least 2,562 people were hospitalized because of Covid-19 and 30 people died from the virus on Saturday, the governor tweeted.
Read the tweet:
One thing to note: These numbers were released by the state’s health agency, and may not line up exactly in real time with CNN’s database drawn from Johns Hopkins University and our Covid tracker.
Thanksgiving is rapidly approaching, and CNN Medical Analyst Dr. Leana Wen is urging Americans to skip visiting family and friends to have holiday dinners around indoor dining tables.
She said people can still visit family by socializing outdoors and described how Americans can host outdoor gatherings.
Here’s what she said:
If you’re the host, set up chairs and tables in advance. I like to have a big table in the middle, where I put all the drinks and plates. I also have chairs set up so that every household is spaced at least 6 feet apart. I’ll pour drinks and then have people come up, individually, to pick them up. Food should be plated separately; no buffets or people reaching into a common bowl. We won’t share food or drinks.
Make sure to keep an eye on the kids. To be safe, put masks on the kids if they’re playing together, though be sure to enforce physical distancing. If they are sharing toys, apply hand sanitizer frequently. We try to do it every 30 minutes.
Designate a bathroom for guests. Guests should go indoors, one at a time. No gathering indoors. Everyone should wear masks while using the restroom. Open windows and doors leading to the restroom if possible.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CBS’s Margaret Brennan on Face The Nation on Sunday, that implementing mitigation efforts can help flatten the curve leading up to the holiday season.
Fauci says implementing mitigation measures — such as universal mask wearing, physical distancing, closing bars and avoiding crowds — “can blunt curves and as we’re getting into the colder season.”
“I would hope that the people who are pushing back on the recommendations for mitigation measures just look at the numbers – look at the facts,” he said.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have the ultimate determination for recommendations on who gets a Covid-19 vaccine first, and that he would have no hesitation in taking it if he was in that group.
“The CDC has the ultimate determination for the recommendations,” he told CBS’s Margaret Brennan on Face the Nation on Sunday. “They do that closely with an Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which is also being complemented by recommendations from the Nation Academy of Medicine, but at the end of the day it’s the CDC.”
Fauci explained that the CDC will make recommendations after an emergency use authorization is implemented as they will know what was discussed with the FDA.
“They’ll be able to say okay, on the basis of our determination and our advisory committee, this is the prioritization of people who will get it,” he said, adding that that if things go well, “and I think that they will,” and the vaccines get the EUA which is expected, “we will have maybe 20 million people will be able to get vaccinated by the middle to the end of December and then as we get into January, February, even more.”
“Would you take it next month?” Brennan asked him.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said that there are two things that make a vaccination program effective: the efficacy of the vaccine and how many people take it.
Fauci was speaking to CBS’s Margaret Brennan on Face The Nation on Sunday. Brennan quoted Operation Warp Speeds chief scientific advisor, Moncef Slaoui, saying “we could have true herd immunity take place somewhere in the month of May as the vaccine is distributed.”
Brennan then asked Fauci if America goes back to normal life in May.
“If you have a highly efficacious vaccine, and only a relatively small 40, 50% of the people get vaccinated, you’re not going to get the herd immunity you need,” Fauci said. “What we do need is we need to get as many people as possible vaccinated.”
This is why, he explained, “we want to be very transparent” and for people to understand the independent, transparent process which led to the point of the US Food and Drug Administration, along with independent advisory committees, saying that the vaccines are safe and effective with an EUA and ultimately a license.
“When the American public hears that, you should be assured that that is the case and if you get an overwhelming majority of the people vaccinated with a highly efficacious vaccine, we can reasonably quickly get into herd immunity that would be a blanket of protection for the country,” Fauci said.
In anticipation of the upcoming holiday season, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is warning Americans about the risk of infection at friends and family gatherings.
“One of the spots, if you want to call them, where you have a risk is seemingly innocent family friends get togethers indoors and it seems like the most natural thing,” Fauci said Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation.
Fauci said he is concerned about people traveling through crowded airports.
“When you get on a crowded plane, you’re in a crowded airport, you’re lining up, not everybody’s wearing masks – that puts yourself at risk,” he said.
He also said that the he is concerned about a possible spike in cases leading up to Christmas.
“You’re not going to see an increase until weeks later – things lag,” he said. “So what you don’t want to see is another spike in cases as we get colder and colder into December and then you start dealing with the Christmas holiday – we can really be in a very difficult situation.”
“So you want to tell people to please, seriously consider decisions that you make,” he added.
Dr. Moncef Slaoui, the head of the government’s effort to develop a vaccine against Covid-19, appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union” this morning to answer questions about the US’s race to develop and distribute a coronavirus vaccine.
Here are the key takeaways from his interview:
The US is seeing an unprecedented pandemic resurgence, and nearly a quarter of all Covid-19 cases reported in the United States so far were recorded in November.
Records are being set in some states: Mississippi reported a single day record in the state with 1,972 cases on Saturday, according to the Mississippi State Department of Health.
In New Mexico, records were set on Saturday with 825 hospitalizations, a tweet from Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham said.
Overall, 37 states are reporting more coronavirus cases in the past week than they did in the previous week. Another eight are seeing a steady number of new cases, and just five are seeing declining numbers.
Here’s a look at where cases are rising:
Sen. David Perdue campaign spokesperson Casey Black says the Georgia senator will remain at home until Sen. Kelly Loeffler receives confirmation of her test results.
What is this about: As CNN reported Saturday, Loeffler’s campaign confirmed that the Georgia Republican tested positive for the coronavirus on Friday but a subsequent test came back as inconclusive on Saturday evening.
Loeffler was maskless with Vice President Mike Pence and Sen. Perdue during campaign events most of the day Friday. The trio rode on a bus from the airport to two campaign events for Georgia senate seat runoff elections.
As Americans prepare to celebrate Thanksgiving next week, some doctors shared what they’re planning for the holiday.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told NPR’s Rachel Martin on Morning Edition Tuesday that his Thanksgiving will be “significantly” different this year than previous holidays.
His three adult daughters — who live in separate parts of the country — said that they did not want to put him, as an elderly person, at risk. Fauci is 79 years old.
He and his wife will have a meal and Zoom with his daughters to spend time with them.
“I don’t like it that way, but I think they’re making a prudent decision in trying to protect their father and I’m proud of them for that,” he said.
CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Sanjay Gupta also said he won’t be visiting family this year.
And CNN Medical Analyst Dr. Leana Wen — who has urged Americans to skip indoor gatherings, but said it’s possible to visit family by socializing outdoors — described how she has hosted outdoor get-togethers.
“I like to have a big table in the middle, where I put all the drinks and plates,” she said. “I also have chairs set up so that every household is spaced at least 6 feet apart. I’ll pour drinks and then have people come up, individually, to pick them up. Food should be plated separately; no buffets or people reaching into a common bowl. We won’t share food or drinks.”
