The United States Weathers Another COVID-19 Spike

Rachel Max ‘24

As America’s confirmed COVID-19 cases are breaking record highs, while vaccines have just started to become available on a wider scale.
It is believed that the vaccine will make the virus more manageable by allowing most of the population to develop immunity.  
As of the writing of this article, the winter holidays have just passed and the numbers are spiking. This is likely related to the 85 million people who traveled for Christmas, which is only 29% less than the number of those who traveled last year, and the 50 million people who, just weeks before, traveled for Thanksgiving. Medical professionals anticipated both holidays would result in spikes, and they were proven right.

“We’ll likely continue to see a surge of cases in the fall and over the holidays,” Karen Edwards, a professor and epidemiologist at the University of California Irvine, said.
Hospitals and ERs in some states are so full that ambulances are being turned away. In an interview with KPIX, California’s Santa Clara County said, “we are seeing emergency rooms unable to accept inbound patients arriving via ambulance at many hospitals throughout the county, requiring diversion of ambulances to other hospitals.”
In December, one Los Angeles doctor, in a somewhat profane rant, took to TikTok to inform people about how bad the situation has gotten. He explained a scenario in which someone gets into a car crash, but hospitals are too full and so the person is unable to be helped. 
Los Angeles recently hit over 800,000 cases. Based on the average percentage of hospitalization, it is likely between 120,000 and 160,000 will end up in hospitals. 
These terrifying numbers are also impacted by people who intentionally try to stop others from getting the vaccine. Some have gone to the internet to spread rumors and one employee at the Aurora Medical Center in Wisconsin intentionally destroyed around 500 doses. The hospital, and many others, do believe that the vaccine is the solution to the pandemic. 
“We continue to believe that vaccination is our way out of the pandemic. We are more than disappointed,” the hospital claimed in a statement.