Christmas is long gone and health officials are now preparing for an even higher spike in Covid-19 numbers. And this time, the spike will rise higher from all the holiday cheer around Christmas and New Years.
Despite repeated warnings from health officials and the CDC to stay home and postpone travel, many Americans continued to celebrate these holidays like before.
According to the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) records, 7.1 million people were screened at TSA checkpoints across the USA in the week leading to Christmas. In fact, nearly 1.2 million people were screened at airports on Wednesday alone (just before Christmas) — a number that set air travel records since the pandemic began.
Public health experts are predicting another surge from all this travel around Christmas, and what’s worse is that it’s coming soon enough. This notion is confirmed and explained by Erin Bromage, an associate professor of biology at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth,
“We've just seen these amplification events, and that's what's happened at the end of this year in the US… We had Thanksgiving, we had Labor Day, we had Halloween, and each one of these events brought lots of people together and just gave the virus more fuel to move through the population."
Bromage then goes on to predict similar results from these winter holidays. She warns,
“Christmas is going to do a similar thing”.
Over the last several weeks, health officials had been advising people to celebrate virtually with family and friends, and connect with them online. The CDC also came up with an extensive guideline about how to host or attend social events, in case someone just had to. Recommendations like hosting the event outdoors, keeping a limited guest list, maintaining social distance, and always wear a mask were given for every holiday.
The CDC even advised those traveling to get tested for Covid-19 and maintain the quarantine routine for a few days before meeting others.
Guidelines or no guidelines, the holidays saw the numbers going higher, and on Saturday, the death toll crossed yet another horrifying pandemic milestone. As per Johns Hopkins University, we Americans had lost 330,747 lives to the deadly virus.
That is to say that 1 in 1000 Americans have died of Covid-19.
Experts are claiming that Covid-19 will soon become the leading cause of death among Americans. The disease has already replaced accidents as the third leading cause of death.
Among all the predictions and warnings from experts, you need to understand one thing for sure. Continue to maintain social distance, wash your hands frequently, and ALWAYS wear face masks properly. And take all precautions possible.