Rising number of infections of the SARS-CoV-2 virus combined with the Thanksgiving holiday presumed to have increased opportunities for the contagion’s spread are causing some health officials to predict an eclipse of the previous high death rates, Newsweek reported.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, which pools several models to create an ''ensemble forecast,'' is predicting as many as just over 3,000 COVID-19-related deaths per day by Dec. 19. Its mid-range estimate is 2,200 per day, Newsweek said.
The United States reached a seven-day average peak of 2,259 deaths per day on April 21, according to worldometers.info. The seven-day moving average of deaths on Tuesday was 1,588, a jump after trending lower for about a week.
The spike was due to a one-day total of 2,673 deaths reported Tuesday following a reported 819 on Sunday.
The Executive Director of the American Public Health Association Dr. Georges C. Benjamin told Newsweek that numbers fluctuate considerably over holiday weekends when routine reporting of deaths are delayed. It was similar over the Labor Day weekend, Newsweek said.
The seven-day average of daily new cases of novel coronavirus infection have trended lower since Nov. 25, when they reached a high of 179,943, to 164,761 as of Tuesday.
However, Tuesday saw the single-day number jump to 184,184.
"The outlook is grim," according to Jennifer Dowd, associate professor of demography and population health at the University of Oxford, who believes the CDC’s higher-end estimates are more realistic considering the models do factor in the presumed higher interaction level of Thanksgiving.
"The virus thrives on precisely the type of social contact that Thanksgiving is about —multiple households coming together, eating and talking indoors for long durations without masks," she said. "The virus travels when people travel, so Thanksgiving can also bring the virus from higher prevalence areas to lower prevalence areas and seed new surges."
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