US coronavirus cases surge amid election battle

Cases and hospitalizations are setting records all around the country just as the holidays and winter approach, demonstrating the challenge that either President Donald Trump or former Vice President Joe Biden will face in the coming months.

Daily new confirmed coronavirus cases in the U.S. have surged 45% over the past two weeks, to a record 7-day average of 86,352, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. Deaths are also on the rise, up 15 per cent to an average of 846 deaths every day.

The total U.S. death toll is already more than 232,000, and totally confirmed U.S. cases have surpassed 9 million. Those are the highest totals in the world, and new infections are increasing in nearly every state.

Public health experts fear potentially dire consequences, at least in the short term.

"Especially concerning is the fact that there are very few hospital beds for patients left in some parts of the country where they are actually having to build new emergency hospitals or airlift patients to other parts of the country. That's a sign that the health care system is buckling under the very severe Covid epidemic that that area is facing. And it's a sign that unless we do something to stop it, we could be overwhelming our ability to care for patients," said Dr. Josh Sharfstein, professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Polls showed the public health crisis and the economy were top concerns for many Americans. They are competing issues that Trump and Biden view through drastically different lenses.

Trump has ignored the advice of his top health advisors, who have issued increasingly urgent warnings in recent days about the need for preventive measures, instead of holding rallies where face coverings were rare and falsely suggesting that the pandemic is waning.

By contrast, Biden has rarely been seen in public without a mask and made public health a key issue. Whether his voice will carry much influence if Trump is declared the winner is uncertain.

Federal health officials have said they believe a vaccine could get emergency use authorization before the end of the year. The first limited supplies of doses would then be immediately distributed to the most vulnerable populations, which is likely to include frontline health care workers. Doses would then gradually become more widely available.

"If you go indoors by yourself or you are in a socially distanced atmosphere wearing a mask, that's pretty safe. But if you are going indoors and you're crowded with a bunch of people eating and drinking in a small space, that is like rolling out the red carpet for the virus, you can expect that the virus is going to spread and maybe to a lot of people all at the same time," according to Sharfstein.

On the treatment front, the makers of two experimental antibody drugs have asked the Food and Drug Administration to allow emergency use of them for people with mild to moderate COVID-19, and Trump, who received one when he was sickened last month, has said he wanted them available right away.

So far, the FDA has granted full approval to only one drug — the antiviral remdesivir — for hospitalized patients. Dexamethasone or similar steroids are recommended for certain severely ill patients under federal treatment guidelines.

The government continues to sponsor many studies testing other treatments alone and in combination with remdesivir.

But the development of treatments could be affected if Trump makes good on threats to fire Dr Anthony Fauci, the government's top infectious disease doctor, or other top health officials Trump has clashed with.

Most Americans support mandating mask-wearing in public and think preventing the virus from spreading is a higher priority than protecting the economy, according to AP VoteCast, a nationwide survey of over 133,000 voters and nonvoters conducted for The Associated Press by NORC at the University of Chicago.

"The incoming president right now is in the transition period is going to have to deal with an enormous rise in the number of cases, the number of hospitalizations and the number of deaths. And I think it's going to be first getting people to recognize the severity of the situation and having people realize that we can come together and take some steps that will save a lot of lives," Sharfstein said.