More than 140,000 people are infected and 60,000 are hospitalized in the U.S. in a single day, a record high.

More than 140,000 people are infected and 60,000 are hospitalized in the U.S. in a single day, a record high.
The 2019 coronavirus epidemic in the United States continues to intensify. The number of new infections exceeded 100,000 on a single day in the past week, and the number of infected people exceeded 140,000 on Tuesday, a record high; the recent average number of deaths among infected people is nearly 1,000, with 1,465 deaths recorded on Tuesday, an obvious growing trend.

As of Tuesday, a record 61,964 people were hospitalized in the U.S., according to outbreak tracking data. Experts warn that the nation’s hospitals will soon be overwhelmed, and that the fall and winter outbreaks will be worse than the spring and summer.

Texas is the first state in the U.S. to have more than one million people infected, the second largest state in the country with a population of 29 million, about three-quarters of the population of California. On Tuesday, more than 10,000 people were newly infected in Texas.

The number of infections in many other states also rose sharply. Some hospitals in Idaho and Missouri are running out of rooms for new patients. Wisconsin and Nevada are renewing their two-week home stay appeal. In Minnesota, restaurants and bars are required to close by 10 p.m., and epidemiologists are asking people to stay home for two weeks.

Epidemiologist Michael Osterholm, who has joined President-elect Biden’s advisory panel on the epidemic, said in a CBS interview that “there’s no question that our hospitals are going to be overcrowded” and that “it’s going to be the darkest days of the epidemic between now and next spring” before vaccines become widely available. Given the current trend of growth, he wouldn’t be surprised to see 200,000 more infections per day.

As for vaccines, Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Pfizer recently announced a new vaccine that could be up to 90 percent effective and is expected to go through an emergency authorization process within the next week or so. Fauci said more data is needed on the status of the vaccine, but he has confidence in Pfizer, his longtime colleagues at the FDA and professional scientists.