US is ‘rounding the corner into a calamity,’ expert says, with Covid-19 deaths projected to double soon

6 min readNov 29, 2020

(CNN)As Thanksgiving week draws to an end, more experts are warning the Covid-19 pandemic will likely get much worse in the coming weeks before a possible vaccine begins to offer some relief.

On April 15, 2,752 people across the United States were reported to have died from Covid-19, more than on any day before or since.

Now daily deaths are rising sharply and fast approaching that dreadful count again. On Wednesday, 2,300 deaths were reported nationwide — the highest toll since May.

The pandemic has now claimed more than 264,800 lives in the country. But how the virus kills has changed in profound ways. Months of suffering have provided a horrific but valuable education: Doctors and nurses know better how to treat patients who contract the virus and how to prevent severe cases from ending in fatality, and a far smaller proportion of people who catch the virus are dying from it than were in the spring.

Yet the sheer breadth of the current outbreak means that the cost in lives lost every day is still climbing.

And unlike during the peak of the spring wave in April, when the deaths were concentrated in a handful of states like New York, New Jersey and Louisiana, now they are scattered widely across the entire nation. There is hardly a community that has not been affected.

Twenty-five states set weekly death records in November, and Thanksgiving gatherings and the start of the holiday shopping season may cause infections to spread still more widely in the coming days.

“We are at risk of repeating what happened in April,” Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota and a member of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s coronavirus task force, said of the death toll. “I shudder to imagine what things might be like in two weeks.”

“Once you go over the case cliff, where you have so many cases that you overwhelm the system, basically at that point when you fall off that case cliff, you’re going to see mortality rates go up substantially,” he said.

Texas and Illinois have reported more than 800 deaths over the past week, while Pennsylvania, Michigan, California and Florida added more than 400 each. In the Upper Midwest, where reports of new cases have started to level off, deaths are still mounting. Nearly 40 percent of all coronavirus deaths in Wisconsin have been reported since the start of November. In North Dakota, where military nurses have been deployed in hospitals, more than 1 out of every 1,000 residents has now died.

Around the country, medical examiners and funeral home directors are grappling with a steady rise in the toll. On a recent night, Dale Clock, who along with his wife owns and operates two funeral homes in western Michigan, handled four Covid-19 deaths in just 12 hours, he said. In the past two weeks, nearly half of the families they serve lost relatives to the virus.

— Campbell Robertson, Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio, Joseph Goldstein and Mitch Smith
The blows came in quick succession when the Kansas City Fire Department lost two longtime firefighters to Covid-19 last weekend, one of them a captain, as the coronavirus continued to rage across much of the Midwest.

More than 200 members of the department have tested positive since the pandemic began, and at least 70 of those have active infections now, according to Fire Chief Donna Lake. The two over the weekend were the second and third to die of the disease; the first was an emergency medic in the spring.

“It affects morale in a big way,” Chief Lake said of the losses.

The International Association of Fire Fighters, which represents more than 320,000 professional firefighters across the United States, said that more than 3,400 members have had the virus nationwide, and 22 have died. There have been many more cases among the nation’s roughly 750,000 volunteer firefighters.

“When we think of firefighters, the first thing we think of is fire trucks,” said Doug Stern, a spokesman for the union. “But in the overwhelming majority of America, firefighters are also paramedics. They’re also E.M.T.s. They’re the first link in the public health chain. They really are health workers, much like doctors and nurses.”

Firefighters are often working in “uncontrolled environments,” he said, dealing with emergencies in houses, buildings or vehicles where surfaces may not have been disinfected, and encountering people who may not be wearing masks or taking other protective measures.

To mitigate those risks, the Kansas City Fire Department has changed its protocols, and now initially sends in a single person in full protective gear to assess some emergency situations, instead of a whole group going in right away.

But the department has also had to send exposed workers back to the front lines, Chief Lake said, because lengthy quarantines were leaving the department critically short of personnel.

The two who died over last weekend were Capt. Robert Rocha, 60, a 29-year veteran of the department, and Scott Davidson, 45, a communications specialist and paramedic. Both were remembered as vital figures in the community.

Captain Rocha “was a very gregarious, larger-than-life kind of guy” who mentored younger firefighters, Chief Lake said. She recalled Mr. Davidson as a family man who brought a valuable frontline perspective from his paramedic service to his more recent job in communications.

The department deems death from Covid-19 to be in the line of duty, and firefighters across the country are known for turning out to ceremonially honor fallen colleagues. But the pandemic necessarily constrained the send-offs in Kansas City, with attendance limits at services and social distance between members of the department who stood at curbside to salute a procession for Mr. Davidson.

A drive-through visitation for Captain Rocha will be held on Sunday, and his funeral service will be closed to the public in person but streamed online.

— Melina Delkic

US is ‘rounding the corner into a calamity,’ expert says, with Covid-19 deaths projected to double soon

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