An increase in reported new daily infections of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 over the past week is being blamed on Thanksgiving gatherings.
“At this point, we could be just picking up the beginning of the Thanksgiving surge, but surely in the following week we’re going to see it,” Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Prevention at the University of Minnesota, told TheHill.com.
“We’re slingshotting this surge of cases into the holiday season in a way that is truly dangerous.”
Quoting The Covid Tracking Project, an organization run by the editorial staff of the left-leaning publication The Atlantic, The Hill says the United States has averaged over 200,000 cases over the past week.
Worldometers.info reports the seven-day average of new infections has risen since Nov. 30, four days after Thanksgiving when the number was 164,182, to 206,731 as of Monday.
The seven-day moving average of daily deaths have been increasing since Nov. 29, according to worldometers.info, from 1,483 to 2,302.
The Hill says the number of new daily infections has declined for two straight weeks in 10 states, particularly Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa and New Mexico, contradicting the Thanksgiving theory.
It added that cases have risen for the past week in 38 states and the District of Columbia.
Regardless, others believe the SARS-CoV-2 virus will not be contained until widespread inoculations of several vaccines awaiting emergency approval by the Food and Drug Administration is implemented.
“The United States is going to kind of muddle through this until there’s a vaccine,” according to Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “It’s becoming increasingly unlikely that we will gain control of this until we have a vaccine.”
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