WASHINGTON | The United States on Wednesday recorded a very heavy toll of more than 3,700 deaths and 250,000 cases of COVID-19 in a single day, a double record since the start of the pandemic, according to figures from Johns Hopkins University.
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The country has been facing a spectacular rebound in the epidemic for more than a month. Some 113,000 people are also currently hospitalized because of the virus, according to data from the US Department of Health. This is also a higher.
Specifically, the country deplored 3,784 deaths between Tuesday and Wednesday, according to a statement made every day at 8:30 p.m. by AFP of university figures, continuously updated.
This is the third time that the United States has crossed the 3,000 daily death mark in a week. The previous 24-hour death record was in late April, at the height of the first wave – which never really fell back into the country.
And the contamination records have also been linked for two weeks. The mark of 200,000 daily cases has been exceeded in 11 of the last 14 days.
Health officials feared the outbreak following the big Thanksgiving family celebration three weeks ago. Millions of Americans had then traveled to join their loved ones. Experts fear that the situation will get even worse during the holiday season.
The huge vaccination campaign that was launched Monday in the United States, with the first injections of the remedy from Pfizer / BioNTech, will not stem the current surge, they warned, because it will take several months before a sufficiently large part of the population is immunized.
Faced with the urgency of the situation and fears of a shortage of vaccine stocks in the coming months, the United States Medicines Agency (FDA) decided to authorize on Wednesday the use of all the vials of the vaccine from Pfizer, which were found to contain sometimes more doses than the five intended.
“The FDA recommends that it is acceptable to use all available doses (the sixth, or even the seventh) from each vial, until the problem is resolved,” the agency tweeted Wednesday night. She said she was in touch with Pfizer on this.
The US government has officially purchased 100 million doses of this vaccine.