COVID-19 Update

World

• New Cases:   684,730 (⬆︎ .99%)
• New Deaths:    12,691 (⬆︎ .80%)

USA

• New Cases:   217,779 (⬆︎ 1.38%)
• New Deaths:      2,974 (⬆︎ 1.00%)

Here in USAmerica Inc, we'll pop up over 300,000 dead some time today (prob'ly already there).

So far this month - in just these 11 days of December - COVID-19 has killed one American every 37 seconds.

At this rate, we'll hit 350,000 right about Christmas, and 450,000 by Inauguration Day.

WaPo:

Daily U.S. death toll will exceed 9/11′s for months, CDC director says

The coronavirus will kill more people in the United States every day for the next two to three months than died in the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, or Pearl Harbor, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield said Thursday.

The stark warning came as the United States set a harrowing record for fatalities for the second day in a row, surpassing 3,300 deaths Thursday and bringing the U.S. death toll to more than 291,800.

U.S. coronavirus deaths surpass nation’s WWII fatalities

The number of people in the United States who have died of covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, is now greater than the number of U.S. service members who died in combat during the second deadliest war in American history.

More than 291,500 U.S. soldiers died in battle during World War II, the Department of Veterans Affairs estimates. Coronavirus-related deaths surpassed that total Thursday to reach more than 291,800, according to The Washington Post’s tracker.

The coronavirus death toll is also equivalent to more than twice as many deaths as in the Civil War, more than five times as many as in World War I and nearly half as many as the roughly 651,000 combat deaths in all U.S. wars since 1775.

For further comparison, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that between 12,000 and 61,000 people in the United States die of influenza each year.

• The Food and Drug Administration said early Friday that it “will rapidly work toward” authorization of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine on an emergency basis. The FDA statement came hours after a federal advisory committee endorsed the vaccine.
• Still, President Trump expressed impatience with the approval process Friday, tweeting that the FDA is “a big, old, slow turtle” while exhorting the agency’s leader, Stephen M. Hahn, to “get the dam vaccines out NOW.”
• Several states have adopted intensified restrictions, including a midnight curfew in Virginia and new “crisis care” standards in New Mexico that bar elective surgeries and allow doctors to ration care if necessary.
• More Americans are shoplifting food, while jobless claims rose by 137,000, signaling the economic strain caused by the pandemic.
• An Ohio legislator attended a committee meeting days after testing positive, and now four other state lawmakers have the virus.
• New Hampshire’s GOP governor blasted anti-maskers after the state’s House speaker died of covid-19. “Please use your heads,” the governor said. “Don’t act like a bunch of children, frankly.”