Yahoo News Post-holiday COVID-19 data spells a grim forecast for the rest of the year

The experts agree: Last Thursday’s Thanksgiving holiday — traditionally celebrated by far-flung friends and family traveling long distances to crowd inside around communal tables while talking and eating — is about to make America’s scariest coronavirus wave to date even scarier.

“We may see a surge upon a surge,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, told ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday. “We don’t want to frighten people, but that’s just the reality. We said that these things would happen as we got into the cold weather and as we began traveling, and they’ve happened.”

“It looked like things were starting to improve in our northern Plains states, and now with Thanksgiving we’re worried that all of that will be reversed,” Dr. Deborah Birx, coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “We know people may have made mistakes over the Thanksgiving time period.”

“It’s going to get worse over the next several weeks,” U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams added on Fox News.

The question now is how much worse. It’s impossible to say for sure. But by rounding up data from a few different sources — previous holiday spikes, current travel patterns, cellphone proximity trackers and various pandemic forecasting models — it’s possible to get a rough start on predicting what to expect in the weeks ahead.

The early numbers are worrisome.

The first thing to consider is how bad America’s baseline already was. On Nov. 27, right before the holiday slowed down testing and reporting, new daily cases hit 205,460 — the first time the U.S. had ever logged more than 200,000 infections in a single day. On Nov. 24 and 25, new daily deaths passed 2,000 for the first time since May. Right now, a record 93,000 Americans are hospitalized, a number that has tripled over the last two months. Even during the spring’s initial peak, hospitalizations never topped 60,000. The difference today, according to the New York Times, is that caseloads qualify as “high” in every single state except Maine, Vermont and Hawaii — not just a few hard-hit cities or regions.

What that means is that there are a lot more infected (and infectious) people out and about than at previous inflection points in the pandemic.

“If you look at the second wave going into the Memorial Day weekend, we had less than 25,000 cases a day,” Birx said on Sunday. “We had only 30,000 inpatients in the hospital and we had way less mortality, way under a thousand. We’re entering this post-Thanksgiving surge with three, four and 10 times as much disease across the country. And so that’s what worries us the most. We saw what happened post-Memorial Day.” ...

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