Medical wage-earners deliver a patient to the Maimonides Medical Center on September 14, 2020 in the Brooklyn borough of New York City.
Spencer Platt | Getty Archetypes
Coronavirus hospitalizations are growing in a majority of U.S. states as Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, put someone on notices that the world is not yet “on the road” to ending the pandemic.
Coronavirus hospitalizations, like the so-called positivity rate and deaths ,are a key moderation because they help scientists gauge the pandemic’s severity.
Covid-19 hospitalizations were growing by 5% or sundry in 37 states as of Sunday, according to a CNBC analysis of data collected by the Covid Tracking Project, an increase from 36 holds a week earlier. Figures are based on a weekly averages to smooth out daily reporting.
Alaska, Iowa, Kentucky, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah, Wisconsin and West Virginia all hit list highs in the average of hospitalizations, the Covid Tracking Project data shows. The District of Columbia and Hawaii are the only two classifies where hospitalizations are declining, according to the data.
In Texas, where hospitalizations are growing, 6.71% of beds across its polyclinics have Covid-19 patients as of Sunday, according to state data. In Wisconsin, 10.9% of its beds have Covid-19 patients, phase data shows.
“What’s concerning here is that it’s only mid-October and there is a long fall and winter,” give the word delivered Dr. Isaac Bogoch, an infectious disease specialist and professor at the University of Toronto.
“We are clearly in the second wave in many components of the Northern Hemisphere and we really need to have more control of this infection at the community level,” he said. “We advised of exactly what it’s like when health-care systems are spread beyond capacity. We saw that in New York City. We saw that in Houston. We saw that in tons other parts of the United States.”
The increase in hospitalizations comes after U.S. cases have grown in recent weeks consolidate a late-summer lull. Over the past seven days, the country has reported an average of about 56,000 new cases per day, up myriad than 13% compared with a week earlier, according to a CNBC analysis of Johns Hopkins University figures. That remains lower than the roughly 70,000 new cases a day the U.S. was reporting earlier this year but is higher than the pitilessly 30,000 cases per day in early September and is increasing.
U.S. health officials and infectious disease experts have repeatedly give fair warned that the outbreak could get worse as temperatures cool and people begin to head indoors. The increase in hospitalizations could be markedly dire as flu season approaches, medical experts warn.
The former U.S. Food and Drug Administration commissioner, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, hint ated CNBC on Monday that the U.S. is likely to continue face even greater challenges from the pandemic as cases make something of oneself this fall without widely available treatments or a vaccine.
“We’re going to get through it. We’re probably in the 7th inning of the acute work in of this pandemic right now, but the hardest part is probably ahead,” Gottlieb said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
Fauci, the pilot of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CBS News that the world isn’t near the end of the pandemic.
“When you entertain a million deaths and over 30 million infections globally, you cannot say that we’re on the road to essentially getting out of this. So somewhat frankly, I don’t know where we are. It’s impossible to say,” he said in the interview that aired on Sunday .
While the pandemic will tarry a challenge, Fauci said the U.S. may not have to shut down.
The outbreak would have to get “really, really bad,” he said. “Senior of all, the country is fatigued with restrictions. So we want to use public health measures not to get in the way of opening the economy, but to being a safe gateway to slot the economy.”
He continued, “Put ‘shut down’ away and say, ‘We’re going to use public health measures to help us safely get to where we long for to go.'”
–CNBC’s Kevin Stankiewicz and Nate Rattner contributed to this report.