Coronavirus cases reported in the United States passed 11 million on Sunday, as the nation shatters records for hospitalizations and daily new infections and as leaders turn to new, painful restrictions to stem the pandemic’s long-predicted surge.
The milestone came one week after the country hit 10 million cases, a testament to just how rapidly the virus is spreading — the first 1 million cases took more than three months. This new wave has increased covid-19 hospitalizations past the peaks seen in April and July, straining health-care systems and pushing some reluctant Republican governors to enact statewide mask mandates for the first time.
Other states are reenacting stay-at-home orders and store closures. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) on Sunday announced sweeping new limits on gatherings for three-weeks — including a ban on indoor dining at restaurants and bars, and a halt to in-person classes at high schools and colleges. Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D) also laid out a slew of new rules, which prohibit indoor social gatherings with people outside one’s household and indoor service at restaurants, bars and more.
“As hard as those first months were for our state, these next few are going to be even harder,” Whitmer said at a news conference, as health experts fear that winter weather driving people indoors will accelerate the crisis.
Inslee acknowledged that slowing the virus would come at a steep price for struggling businesses, even as the state works to distribute millions more in aid. He and Whitmer both appealed to the federal government to step in with more help. Congress remains deadlocked on a stimulus package, and President Trump — still denying his election loss — has largely tuned out the pandemic’s surge; his refusal to concede is also stalling the transition to a new administration, including the formal transfer of information on the nation’s pandemic response.
Whitmer said that Trump has “an opportunity to meet the needs of the people of this country” and emphasized the importance of his final months in office. Inslee was already looking ahead to the administration of President-elect Joe Biden.
“All of us who feel, as I do, the pain of the small-business people ought to be pounding the doors of the Congress and the new president, who I’m glad we’re going to have, to really get this job done,” Inslee said.
Washington’s restrictions are not as tough as its stay-at-home order issued in March but extend into nearly every aspect of daily life. Wedding and funeral receptions are forbidden. Religious services and in-store retail are forced to operate at reduced capacity. Even outdoor social gatherings must be kept to a maximum of five people from outside one’s household.
Inslee and other leaders in the state emphasized the need to intervene early amid spiraling statistics, even as Washington posts some of the lowest numbers for new coronavirus infections in the country. The number of hospital patients with covid-19 recently rose about 40 percent in a week, officials said, and Seattle’s mayor said that nearly a fifth of the city’s cases have come just in the past two weeks.
Clint Wallace, an ICU nurse in Spokane, joined Inslee at Sunday’s news conference to plead with residents for their help. He called the ICU “as busy as I’ve seen it.”
“We are exhausted,” Wallace said of health-care workers around the state.
State and local officials nationwide are reinstating restrictions to fight the virus. New Mexico and Oregon on Friday ordered extensive new statewide shutdowns, while the Navajo Nation — devastated early on by the virus — reissued its stay-at-home order for at least three weeks. The Navajo Nation said cases threaten to swamp the health system on the southwestern reservation without immediate action.
North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum (R) on Friday issued a statewide mask mandate and new capacity limits on businesses, less than a week after Utah Gov. Gary R. Herbert (R) announced a similar mask order in the face of overwhelmed hospitals warning that they might have to ration care.
“Our situation has changed, and we must change with it,” Burgum said in a late-night video message.
But state rules are just one piece of the puzzle, and some leaders are looking to Congress and the incoming president to take stronger action.
Ron Klain, Joe Biden’s incoming chief of staff, said Sunday it’s critical for the president-elect’s transition team to start working with Trump administration officials to ensure “nothing drops in this change of power” that could imperil the distribution of a potential coronavirus vaccine.
“Joe Biden is going to become president of the United States in the midst of an ongoing crisis. That has to be a seamless transition,” Klain said on NBC News’s “Meet the Press.”
President Trump’s White House is blocking the administration from formally cooperating with Biden, forcing the president-elect’s transition team to continue preparations with recently departed government officials and other experts. That means Biden’s team has not heard from Trump’s about vaccine development and other work to combat the pandemic.
A health expert on Biden’s covid-19 advisory board said there’s “a lot of information that needs to be transmitted. It can’t wait until the last minute.”
It is in the nation’s interest that the transition team get the threat assessments that the team knows about, understand the vaccine distribution plans, need to know where the stockpiles are, what the status is of masks and gloves,” said Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a professor at Harvard Medical School, on ABC News’s “This Week.”
Anthony S. Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, compared the process Sunday to “passing a baton in a race.”
“I’ve been through multiple transitions now, having served six presidents for 36 years, and it’s very clear that transition process that we go through … is really important in a smooth handing over of the information,” Fauci said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“Of course it would be better if we could start working with them,” he added when asked whether working with Biden’s team would serve the public interest.
On “Meet the Press,” Klain said there is “not that much Joe Biden can do right now to change things,” because he is not yet president.
“Right now we have a crisis that’s getting worse,” Klain said. “We had never had a day with 100,000 cases in a single day until last week. By next week, we may see 200,000 cases in a single day.”
On the morning of November 7, major news networks starting with CNN called the presidential election for Joe Biden. Although the election has yet to be officially certified, Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris have wasted no time preparing their response to the rapidly worsening coronavirus pandemic.
Over the past week, the US has averaged more than 150,000 new COVID-19 cases per day, an increase of 81% from the average on November 1. The US had a record 181,200 new reported cases on November 13. Over 11 million Americans have been infected, and the nation is nearing a grim milestone of 250,000 deaths. Experts warn that the worst is yet to come. As temperatures drop and family-centric holidays approach, people are likely to spend more time socializing indoors with non-household members, increasing the risk for COVID-19 transmission.
Mitigating the spread of the coronavirus and preventing more deaths are top priorities for the incoming Biden-Harris administration. Biden’s campaign team published a seven-point plan to beat COVID-19, and on November 9, the Biden-Harris transition team named a COVID-19 Advisory Council tasked with guiding the federal response to the pandemic immediately after the inauguration.
The council “will be consulting with state and local officials to gauge public-health steps needed to bring the virus under control,” Evan Halper and Noam Levey reported in the Los Angeles Times. “The board will also focus on racial and ethnic disparities in how, where, and how quickly the virus is spreading.”
Innovative Plan: Tell the Truth
The Biden-Harris plan sets a new tone for the nation’s coronavirus response, using federal powers and leadership to centralize the acquisition and distribution of personal protective equipment (PPE), along with the coordination of testing and contact tracing, instead of leaving those vital resources to be led in 50 different ways by state governors. It emphasizes evidence-based guidance and empowers public health officials and scientists to guide and revise the nation’s reopening strategy as the pandemic evolves.
“You’ll immediately see a change of tone, a change in communication,” Ezekiel Emanuel, MD, PhD, the vice provost for global initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania, told Politico.“This is the stuff of real leadership: telling the truth, modeling the right behaviors like wearing a mask, only having small crowds, putting the scientists out there.”
The first priority in the plan is to ensure that all Americans have access to regular, reliable, and free coronavirus testing. Rapid testing is vital for identifying, isolating, and treating new cases of COVID-19, but the US has been crippled by continuing test shortages and long lag times before results are reported. Biden plans to double the number of drive-through testing sites while scaling up next-generation solutions like home tests.
Contact tracing goes hand-in-hand with testing in the public health response to COVID-19, and the plan would establish a US Public Health Job Corps to train and mobilize 100,000 Americans to perform culturally competent contact tracing in communities most affected by COVID-19.
The second priority is to fix the nation’s PPE problems. N95 masks, gloves, gowns, and other PPE used by health care staff are still in short supply. AARP reported that one in four nursing homes ran short of PPE between August 24 and September 20. (Nursing homes continue to be a hot spot for coronavirus transmission.) Biden would use the Defense Production Act to increase production of PPE and distribute the supply to states instead of leaving states to fend for themselves.
For the third priority, Biden would tap the nation’s wealth of science experts to provide clear public guidance on how communities should navigate the pandemic. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) would lead this effort, with an emphasis on helping communities determine when it is safe to reopen schools and various types of businesses.
Navigating Hurdles to Safe, Effective, Accepted Vaccine
Although the pharmaceutical company Pfizer announced on November 9 that its coronavirus vaccine trial showed positive early results, the road to vaccinating all Americans is tortuous. Pfizer still needs to seek emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and ramp up vaccine production to meet the global need. In the meantime, Biden plans to invest $25 billion in a vaccine manufacturing and distribution plan that ensures every American can get vaccinated for free. This fourth priority would make the vaccine accessible to all people and communities regardless of income or any other factor.
The fifth priority is to protect Americans who are at high risk of getting seriously ill or dying from COVID-19. This includes people over 65, nursing home residents, and people living in neighborhoods with higher rates of COVID-19. Biden would establish a COVID-19 Racial and Ethnic Disparities Task Force (PDF) to report on disparities in COVID-19 infection, hospitalization, and death rates, as well as to provide recommendations to Congress and the Federal Emergency Management Agency on how best to distribute resources and relief funds to combat these disparities. The plan also calls for strengthening the Affordable Care Act to ensure that during the pandemic, Americans have health insurance coverage.
During the presidential campaign, Biden called for a national mask mandate based on the growing body of evidence that mask-wearing can considerably reduce the transmission of respiratory viruses like the one that causes COVID-19. Biden plans to coordinate with governors and mayors to convince Americans to wear a mask when they are around people outside their household. Currently, 34 states and the District of Columbia mandate face masks in public, but there is no nationwide requirement.
Finally, the plan takes the long view on pandemic threats by rebuilding and reinvesting in defenses that will help the world predict and prevent future pandemics. The Biden administration has declared that the US will rejoin the World Health Organization, restore the White House National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense, which was eliminated by the Trump administration in 2018, and shore up CDC’s global corps of disease detectives.
Public Health Experts at the Helm
The newly announced COVID-19 Advisory Council is a who’s who of public health experts, former government officials, and doctors, including several from California. The panel currently comprises 13 members, but Biden has said it may be expanded.
The three cochairs of the advisory board are former surgeon general Vivek Murthy, MD; former FDA commissioner David Kessler, MD, a UCSF professor of pediatrics, and of epidemiology and biostatistics; and Marcella Nunez-Smith, MD, MPH, an associate professor of internal medicine, public health, and management at Yale University whose research focuses on health disparities.
The other members appointed so far include:
Luciana Borio, MD, vice president at the venture capital firm In-Q-It. Borio served in multiple leadership roles in the Trump and Obama administrations in the National Security Council and FDA.
Rick Bright, PhD, director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority under Trump and Obama. Bright resigned from the government in October after being removed from his vaccine development role by President Trump.
Ezekiel Emanuel, MD, PhD, the vice provost for global initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania. Emanuel served in the Obama administration as special advisor for health policy to Peter Orszag, PhD, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget.
Atul Gawande, MD, MPH, a professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Gawande is a staff writer covering health and medicine at the New Yorker and served in the Clinton administration as senior adviser in the Department of Health and Human Services.
Eric Goosby, MD, a professor of medicine at UCSF. Goosby, an expert on HIV/AIDS, led policy work in this field under Clinton and Obama.
Celine Gounder, MD, a clinical assistant professor of internal medicine and infectious diseases at New York University.
Julie Morita, MD, executive vice president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and former commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health.
Michael Osterholm, PhD, MPH, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
Loyce Pace, MPH, president and executive director of the Global Health Council.
Robert Rodriguez, MD, a professor of emergency medicine at UCSF.
The United States’ top infectious-disease expert, Anthony S. Fauci, cautioned against despair as the country endures a surge in covid-19 cases unlike anything it has previously seen. A record high of 145,835 new cases were reported Wednesday, just one week after the U.S. hit 100,000 cases for the first time. At least 65,000 Americans are hospitalized with covid-19, according to The Post’s latest data.
President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris have released a seven-point plan regarding the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Biden administration’s seven pandemic plans:
1. Ensure all Americans have access to regular, reliable and free testing by doubling the number of drive-thru testing sites, investing in next-generation testing, developing a pandemic testing board to produce and distribute tests, and establishing a U.S. Public Health Jobs Corps.
2. Provide all states, cities, tribes and territories with critical supplies. Efforts will include full use of the Defense Production Act, building American-sourced and manufactured capabilities.
3. Provide clear, consistent and evidence-based guidance for how communities should navigate the pandemic. Planned resources will be tailored to the needs of schools, small businesses and families.
4. Plan for effective and equitable distribution of treatments and vaccines. The administration intends to invest in a $25 billion manufacturing and distribution plan to guarantee every American can receive the vaccine for free. The administration also said it will work to ensure that politics won’t play a role in determining the safety and efficacy of vaccines.
5. Protect older Americans and other high-risk groups. Efforts will include establishing a COVID-19 racial and ethnic disparities task force and a nationwide pandemic dashboard that can be checked in real-time to gauge local transmission.
6. Rebuild and expand defenses to prevent and mitigate pandemic threats, including the restoration of the White House National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense and the nation’s membership with the World Health Organization.
President-elect Joe Biden on Monday announced the members of his coronavirus task force, a group made up entirely of doctors and health experts,signaling his intent to seek a science-based approach to bring the raging pandemic under control.
Biden’s task force will have three co-chairs: Vivek H. Murthy, surgeon general during the Obama administration; David Kessler, Food and Drug Administration commissioner under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton; and Marcella Nunez-Smith, associate dean for health equity research at the Yale School of Medicine. Murthy and Kessler have briefed Biden for months on the pandemic.
Biden will inherit the worst crisis since the Great Depression, made more difficult by President Trump’s refusal to concede the election and commit to a peaceful transition of power. The Trump administration has not put forward national plans for testing, contact tracing and resolving shortages in personal protective equipment that hospitals and health-care facilities are experiencing again as the nation enters its third surge of the virus.
“Dealing with the coronavirus pandemic is one of the most important battles our administration will face, and I will be informed by science and by experts,” Biden said in a statement. “The advisory board will help shape my approach to managing the surge in reported infections; ensuring vaccines are safe, effective, and distributed efficiently, equitably, and free; and protecting at-risk populations.”
The United States is recording more than 100,000 new coronavirus cases a day and, on many days, more than 1,000 deaths, a toll expected to worsen during the crucial 10-week stretch of the transition. It remains unclear whether Trump or his top aides will oversee and lead a robust response to the pandemic during the transition, which could further exacerbate the crisis Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala D. Harris inherit.
The 13-member task force also includes former Trump administration officials, including Rick Bright, former head of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, who, after being demoted, spoke out against the administration’s approach to the pandemic. Luciana Borio, director for medical and biodefense preparedness on Trump’s National Security Council until 2019, is also on the panel.
The group includes several other prominent doctors:
· Ezekiel Emanuel, chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania.
· Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a professor at Harvard Medical School who is a prolific author.
· Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
· Eric Goosby, global AIDS coordinator under President Barack Obama and professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco School of Medicine.
· Celine R. Gounder, clinical assistant professor of medicine and infectious diseases at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine.
· Julie Morita, executive vice president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a philanthropy focused on health issues.
· Loyce Pace, president and executive director of the Global Health Council, a U.S.-based nonprofit organization dedicated to global health issues.
· Robert Rodriguez, professor of emergency medicine at the UCSF School of Medicine.
Rebecca Katz, director of the Center for Global Health Science and Security at Georgetown University Medical Center, and Beth Cameron, director for global health security and biodefense on the White House National Security Council during the Obama administration, are serving as advisers to the transition task force.
Task force members will work with state and local officials to craft public health and economic policies to address the virus and racial and ethnic disparities, while also working to reopen schools and businesses, the transition team said in a news release.
While the makeup of the task force garnered widespread praise, Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine, said the group needs more geographic diversity.
“They are all from the Acela corridor or the [San Francisco] Bay Area,” he said. “Who is going to be the field marshal or the supreme allied commander who goes into middle of the country and get this done? The coasts are doing okay but the red states are being hammered and the deaths are going to be extraordinary. There needs to be a frank reckoning between leaders of the two parties, to say we cannot let this happen.”
Public health experts said Biden should use the transition to provide leadership as the pandemic continues through a deadly stretch and begin communicating a strong national message.
“Clearly from the election outcomes, half the country doesn’t believe we’re in a crisis,” said Kavita Patel, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who worked on health policy in the Obama administration. Biden and Harris “have an incredible platform that can be used for communication. The country needs clear daily briefings that we thought we’d get from the White House coronavirus task force. They have an incredible platform, if not an official platform.”
Biden plans to call Republican and Democratic governors to ask for their help in developing a consistent message from federal and state leaders, according to three Biden advisers who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about these matters. He will urge governors to adopt statewide mask mandates and to provide clear public health guidance to their constituents, including about social distancing and limiting large gatherings.
The task force will have subgroups that focus on issues related to the response, including testing, vaccine distribution and personal protective equipment, according to two people familiar with the plans who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal plans that were not yet public.
In his victory speech Saturday, Biden addressed challenges in bringing the pandemic under control.
“We cannot repair the economy, restore our vitality or relish life’s most precious moments — hugging a grandchild, birthdays, weddings, graduations, all the moments that matter most to us — until we get this virus under control,” Biden said. “That plan will be built on a bedrock of science. It will be constructed out of compassion, empathy and concern. I will spare no effort — or commitment — to turn this pandemic around.”
Yet the plans Biden laid out on the campaign trail are set to collide with political realities. That includes a deeply divided nation in which more than 71 million people voted for Trump and the possibility of having to navigate a Republican-controlled Senate disinclined to support a greater federal role in testing and contact tracing, among other responsibilities now left mostly to the states.
Biden’s most ambitious plans will require significant congressional funding. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has said he would like to pass new coronavirus relief measures during Congress’s lame-duck session, and Congress faces a Dec. 11 government funding deadline. Biden and his team are poised to begin engaging with congressional Democrats on their priorities.
Biden’s plans include dramatically expanding testing and building a U.S. public health jobs corps to have 100,000 Americans conduct contact tracing. They also include ramping up production of personal protective equipment and implementing a vaccine distribution plan.
Murthy, who served as the 19th U.S. surgeon general, is a physician whose nomination was stalled in the Senate for more than a year because of his view that gun violence is a public health issue. Three months into the Trump administration, he was replaced as “the nation’s doctor” with more than two years left on his four-year term.
In 2016, he wrote a landmark report on drug and alcohol addiction, which put that condition alongside smoking, AIDS and other public health crises that previous surgeons general addressed. The report called the addiction epidemic “a moral test for America.” Murthy’s office sent millions of letters to doctors asking for their help to combat the opioid crisis.
The son of immigrants from India, he earned medical and MBA degrees at Yale before joining the faculty at Harvard Medical School, where his research focused on vaccine development and the participation of women and minorities in clinical trials.
After leaving his post as surgeon general, he wrote a book on loneliness and social isolation, including their implications for health, that grew out of his conversations with people in clinical practice and as surgeon general.
Several public health officials celebrated Nunez-Smith’s leadership role on the task force. Her research focuses on promoting health and health-care equity in marginalized populations, according to her Yale biography. She has also studied discrimination that patients endure in the health-care system — expertise that many said was welcome in an epidemic that is disproportionately affecting people of color.
Kessler was FDA commissioner from 1990 to 1997, during the George H.W Bush and Clinton administrations. He is well-known for his attempts to regulate cigarettes — an effort that resulted in a loss in the Supreme Court, which ruled that the agency did not have the authority. That prompted Congress to pass a law, enacted in 2009, that explicitly gave the agency that power.
Kessler, a pediatrician and lawyer, worked at the FDA to accelerate AIDS treatments and on food and nutrition issues. He oversaw the FDA’s development of standardized nutrition labels and notably ordered the seizure of orange juice labeled “fresh” because it was made from concentrate. He has written several books on diet, mental illness and other topics, and has served as dean of the medical schools at Yale and UCSF.
After an exhausting and contentious election campaign, and a vote count that was prolonged by enormous voter turnout and record-breaking use of early and mail-in voting, the major news networks have now made their calls. Joseph R. Biden, Jr. will be the 46th President of the United States, and Kamala D. Harris will be the first woman, and first person of color, to become Vice President. Securing an electoral victory by achieving razor-thin victories in a number of battleground states, President-elect Biden received the largest number of votes of any candidate in American history. Although the Trump campaign vowed to pursue legal challenges to the validity of the election, Biden’s win appeared to be secure.
The election results came in the midst of a dramatic acceleration of the coronavirus pandemic.Over the last week, the average number of new cases per day in the US surpassed 96,000, up 54 percent from just two weeks earlier. On Friday the nation recorded a pandemic-high 132,700 new cases, along with at least 1,220 COVID deaths. Hospitalizations were up in most states, hospital bed and workforce capacity are strained, and public health experts warned that the coming weeks and months will bring even worse news. Unsurprisingly, the pandemic was a top issue on the minds of voters. According to exit polls, however, the electorate was deeply divided on the issue: 82 percent of Biden voters cited the pandemic itself as one of the most important issues in determining their vote, with only 14 percent of Trump voters agreeing. Conversely, 82 percent of Trump voters said the economy was the most important issue on their minds, as opposed to Biden voters, only 17 percent of whom listed the economy as their top issue. Based on that data, it appears that at least one important split among the electorate was “lives” versus “livelihoods”—whether the pandemic response, or its impact on the economy, was of greatest concern.
In the coming weeks, attention is likely to turn in earnest to addressing both aspects of the issue during the lame duck period. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has signaled that he intends toresume negotiations on a stimulus package with Democrats in the House, whose majority was diminished in the election. At this writing, it appears likely that control of the Senate will come down to the results of two runoff elections in Georgia, and McConnell will undoubtedly want to make the case that Senate Republicans have taken decisive action to bolster the economic recovery. It’s also possible that, as part of the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed, a coronavirus vaccine will be granted approval by the end of the year. Health officials at both federal and state levels must continue to work closely together to tackle the complex logistics of distributing and administering the vaccine, and it will be critical for the incoming administration to seek ways to collaborate with the Trump team to ensure a smooth transition of this vital work.
The outcome of the Senate runoffs in Georgia will determine whether the Biden administration must work with divided Congress, or an evenly split Senate in which Vice President-elect Kamala Harris casts the deciding vote. In either case, given the political realities underscored by the electoral result, it’s very unlikely than any of the more sweeping proposals in the Biden campaign platform—lowering the eligibility age for Medicare, establishing a government-run “public option” insurance plan, extending premium subsidies to middle-income workers—will advance very far. Rather, as we’ve discussed before, we’d expect a Biden administration’s first actions to focus on an enhanced federal response to managing the pandemic, including issuing a national mask mandate, enhancing efforts to augment and coordinate personal protective equipment (PPE) supply, and rejoining the World Health Organization.
As we look to the next two years, most healthcare policy changes are likely to come in the form ofregulatory reform, such as reversing waivers for Medicaid programs to establish work requirements and withdrawing flexibility for short-term plans that fail to comply with the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Other Trump-era regulatory changes might continue. There’s broad bipartisan support for efforts to make value-based Medicare payment reforms more successful, to increase price transparency, and to address the issues of surprise billing and the cost of prescription drugs. But even in if Democrats beat the odds and win back control of the Senate, we believe the Biden administration will have other legislative priorities that will supersede any attempt to dramatically overhaul healthcare coverage—voting reforms, climate change legislation, immigration reform, and long-overdue infrastructure investments.
Unless, that is, the Supreme Court throws a spanner in the works by overturning the ACA. Should the Court rule that the individual mandate is not severable from the rest of the law, and that the entire ACA is unconstitutional, the new administration would be forced to take quick action to protect coverage and insurance protections for millions of Americans. In that event, healthcare would rocket to the top of the agenda. Either the Biden team would be forced to find a compromise solution that could pass a divided Congress, or (if Harris is the tie-breaking vote) find a way to use the budget reconciliation process to address coverage. That potential drama lies months in the future, as we won’t know the outcome of the case until next spring. We’ll monitor the oral arguments in the ACA case closely, and let you know what we hear, and what we think it means for the future of the case.
In the coming weeks, we’ll be watching for answers to some of the big healthcare questions that lie ahead: How will the Trump administration handle the worsening pandemic situation in the 75 days between now and Inauguration Day? Will any new stimulus package include additional economic relief for healthcare providers? When and how will a COVID vaccine become widely available? And perhaps most importantly, what toll will the “third wave” of the pandemic take on a nation already exhausted by a difficult year, and a bitter political fight? Surely one reason to be optimistic is that, having turned out to vote in the largest numbers in a century, Americans are more engaged than ever in finding a way forward amid the problems that confront us. Let’s hope our political leaders from across the ideological spectrum will rise to the occasion, and meet this difficult moment with positive, constructive solutions.
More than 132,700 new cases were announced across the United States on Friday. The country also reported more than 1,000 deaths for the fourth straight day.
As the eyes of a tired nation remained transfixed on the results of the presidential election, the United States set a daily record for new cases for the third straight day, with more than 132,700 new cases on Friday. And it reported more than 1,000 deaths for the fourth straight day, the first such stretch since August.
The United States first reported a record of over 107,000 cases in a single day on Wednesday. On Thursday, it was over 121,000 new cases, another record, according to a New York Times database.
The country recorded more than 1,220 deaths on Friday. It was the first time over 1,000 deaths had been recorded for four consecutive days since Aug. 25-28.
At least 17 states reported single day records for new cases on Friday. And four states reported record deaths: Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota and Utah.
In 27 states, there have been more cases announced in the past week than in any other seven-day stretch since the pandemic began. More than 54,800 people were hospitalized with the virus on Friday, according to the Covid Tracking Project.
Driven by surges in the United States and Europe, new daily cases have surpassed 605,000 globally for the first time and a harrowing 50 million total cases appears to be close on the horizon.
Across the continent, hospitals and health care systems are stretched thin, prompting fresh lockdowns and restrictions.
Portugal declared a new state of emergency on Friday. Romania, which passed 10,000 daily cases for the first time, announced that it would close schools and implement an overnight curfew. Poland reported a record 445 virus deaths on Friday and admitted the first patient to its new field hospital at a stadium in Warsaw.
As of Saturday morning, at least 1,242,600 people with Covid-19 worldwide had died since the start of the pandemic. Both new infections and deaths have risen more than 30 percent in the past 14 days.
The number of confirmed cases lags behind the true number of infections, though it is guesswork to say by how much. Countries around the world have worked to increase their testing capacity, but the new surges are straining even that in some places.
Germany, which had been lauded for its testing capacity early on, is tightening the rules governing who gets a test paid for by the public health insurers. Under new rules those with flulike symptoms are only eligible if they also belong to a high-risk group, or can prove contact to someone either infected or at high risk of becoming infected.
“Test, test test — but target,” read a government announcement released on Friday. In the first week of November, the country’s labs were able to handle nearly 1.6 million tests a day, but as the new cases rise and with more people becoming sick with seasonal flu, the system is under stress.
HENRY KOTULA 
