U.S. Hospitals Need All the Help They Can Get, Especially as Flu Season Accelerates
Imagine finding out that the entire city of Flint, Mich. had been hospitalized. Or, Erie, Pa., or Green Bay, Wisc. Those cities are each home to around 100,000 people, the number of Americans who yesterday were reported to be hospitalized with COVID-19. More than 19,000 of those folks are in intensive care units. Nearly 7,000 American men and women are on ventilators.
100,000 hospitalizations is just the latest number in the drumbeat of horrifying statistics that have characterized this most recent surge of COVID-19. But there are things we can all do. Wear a mask. Wash your hands. Practice social distancing. And, as my colleague Alice Park reports, get a seasonal flu shot.
The influenza vaccine won’t protect you from COVID-19, but it could help protect the U.S. health care system. “In the same way that COVID-19 often gets to the point where someone has to be hospitalized to support their breathing, or needs to be in the ICU with a breathing tube or ventilator, unfortunately we see that in the most severe cases of influenza as well,” New York City health commissioner Dr. David Chokshi told Alice. “What we worry about is that happening at the same time and really stressing the capacity of our hospitals.”
Health officials typically look to the southern hemisphere to predict the severity of our own flu season. There, influenza cases have been low—fortunately, it seems, lockdowns, social distancing and messaging around mask-wearing during the COVID-19 pandemic may have helped keep seasonal flu cases under control in that part of the world. Regardless of how bad this flu season gets, getting a flu shot can be one more individual action to help protect the most vulnerable Americans until a COVID-19 vaccine becomes widely available.
Flu vaccines are typically up to 50% effective. That might not guarantee that you won’t get sick. However, it will make it less likely, and that extra level of individual protection, when applied across an entire population, can help keep more Americans out of hospitals already overburdened with COVID-19 cases—and save lives.
Living through the COVID-19 pandemic is hard. TIME's new advice column is here to help, with expert-guided answers to your most pressing coronavirus questions. Need help breaking the news that you won't be home for the holidays? Deciding if that dinner party is safe to attend? Fighting through your quarantine fatigue? Our health reporters will consult experts who can help find a safe and practical solution. Send us your pandemic dilemmas at covidquestions@time.com.
TODAY'S CORONAVIRUS OUTLOOK
Editor’s note: Because of holiday-related delays, COVID-19 data is likely to be a little strange over the next few days. For that reason, we’re temporarily removing the typical maps from The Coronavirus Brief, but we’re still including the numbers as reported, as well as some of the charts.
The Global Situation
More than 64 million people around the world had been diagnosed with COVID-19 as of 1 a.m. E.T. today, and more than 1.4 million people have died. On Dec. 2, there were 632,548 new cases and 12,487 new deaths confirmed globally. Here's how the world as a whole is currently trending:
And here is every country with over 900,000 confirmed cases:
Warner Bros.—one of the world’s biggest and most-influential film-making studios—made an industry-upending announcement today: all of its 2021 movie releases will debut simultaneously in theaters and on the streaming service HBO Max. Social-distancing guidelines have for months been slowly hacking away at the traditional model of feature-film releases, but this announcement makes clear just how dramatically the pandemic has changed the movie industry.
Moscow will open vaccination centers to distribute its Sputnik V vaccine on Saturday, the city’s mayor announced today. Teachers, doctors, and social workers will be first to get the jab. The vaccine’s developers announced in November that interim data showed Sputnik V to be 92% effective, an announcement that came just two days after Pfizer released its results, but was based on many fewer virus cases in the trial. The Russian government approved the vaccine in August despite a lack of advanced testing.
Former French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing died on Wednesday from complications of COVID-19. He was 94. Giscard, who served as president from 1974 to 1981, was hospitalized in September for respiratory problems, and then readmitted in mid-November. The death of the former leader “has plunged the French nation into mourning," current President Emmanuel Macron said in a statement. After a distressing late-October and early-November—daily cases per 100,000 people peaked at 82.3 on Nov. 5—France seems to have, at least for now, gotten its outbreak under control thanks to a nationwide lockdown instituted in late October.
Germany will extend its partial lockdown into the new year, extending closures of bars, movie theaters and gyms to Jan. 10, Chancellor Angela Merkel said yesterday. The measures add an additional three weeks to measures initiated Nov. 2 that had been set to expire Dec. 20, after being extended in late November. Daily case rates in Germany haven't dropped in recent weeks, but the curve in the country does appear to have flattened.
The Situation in the U.S.
The U.S. had recorded more than 13 million coronavirus cases as of 1 a.m. E.T. today. More than 273,000 people have died. On Dec. 2, there were 200,070 new cases and 3,157 new deaths confirmed in the U.S. Here's how the country as a whole is currently trending:
Facebook says it will begin deleting false rumors about COVID-19 vaccines from its platforms, part of what it characterizes as its policy “to remove misinformation about the virus that could lead to imminent physical harm.” The policy diverges from the way the tech company has previously handled debunked claims about other kinds of vaccines, which were “downranked” on people’s Facebook newsfeeds, but not removed, according to the New York Times.
Former Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton have all volunteered to get a COVID-19 vaccine shot on camera—once one has been authorized by the Food and Drug Administration, of course—in order to assure Americans that the jab is safe. “If Anthony Fauci tells me this vaccine is safe, and can vaccinate, you know, immunize you from getting COVID, absolutely, I'm going to take it," Obama said in an interview with Joe Madison on SiriusXM posted online yesterday.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said this morning that a compromise on a new coronavirus stimulus package is “within reach,” according to CNN. Yesterday, Democratic legislative leaders pushed forward a $908 billion bipartisan stimulus plan as the starting point for talks, a much skinnier aid bill than their previous $2.2 trillion offer. President Trump said today he would sign a deal put forward by McConnell.
All numbers unless otherwise specified are from the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering, and are accurate as of Dec. 3, 1 a.m. E.T. To see larger, interactive versions of these maps and charts, click here.
WHAT ELSE YOU SHOULD KNOW
China’s Vaccine Diplomacy
China is getting ready to ship hundreds of millions of COVID-19 vaccine doses to countries around the world, a campaign that could help repair a global image damaged after the country mishandled the early stages of the pandemic almost a year ago, CNN reports. Beijing-based drugmaker Sinovac Biotech will send 46 million doses to Brazil and 50 million doses to Turkey. Read more here.
Keeping the Faith
Dr. Paul Farmer, co-founder of the Boston-based nonprofit organization Partners in Health and one of the world’s most influential health equity experts, hasn’t lost hope, despite the global pandemic. “When you settle on a problem, devote the resources to it and have at least some ability to incorporate new information, every time, it gets better,” he told my colleague Jamie Ducharme. Read her profile here.
Cyberattacks Underway on Vaccine-Distribution Networks
IBM’s cybersecurity division has uncovered cyberattacks on governments and companies tasked with distributing vaccines for COVID-19 around the world, the New York Times reports. The motive of the attacks remain unclear, but IBM researchers said they seemed geared towards stealing refrigeration technology or otherwise stymying delivery efforts. The researchers also don’t know if the attacks were successful, and they said that the sophistication of the attacks made it likely that a government was behind them, but they could not be sure which one. Read more here.
Thanks for reading. We hope you find the Coronavirus Brief newsletter to be a helpful tool to navigate this very complex situation, and welcome feedback at coronavirus.brief@time.com. If you have specific questions you'd like us to answer, please send them to covidquestions@time.com.
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Today's newsletter was written by Alejandro de la Garza and edited by Elijah Wolfson.
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