US may see 200k Covid cases daily soon: Top doctor

The rapidly escalating surge in infections across the US has caused a shortage of intensive care-unit beds, nurses and other front-line staff in virus hot spots that can no longer keep up with the flood of unvaccinated patients.

Warning of tough days ahead with surging Covid-19 infections, the director of the National Institutes of Health said Sunday that unvaccinated people are “sitting ducks” for a Delta variant that is ravaging the country and showing little sign of letting up

Francis Collins, director of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), left, and Diana Bianchi, director of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, listen during a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee hearing in Washington, DC (Bloomberg)

“This is going very steeply upward with no signs of having peaked out,” Dr Francis Collins told “Fox News Sunday”.

While the US currently is seeing an average of about 129,000 new infections a day — a 700% increase from the beginning of July — that number could jump in the next couple weeks to 200,000, a level not seen since among the pandemic’s worst days in January and February, Collins said.

He said the US could decide in the next couple weeks whether to offer coronavirus booster shots to Americans this fall. Among the first to receive them could be health care workers, nursing home residents and other older Americans.

Federal health officials have been actively looking at whether extra shots for the vaccinated may be needed as early as this fall, reviewing case numbers in the US “almost daily” as well as the situation in other countries such as Israel, where preliminary studies suggest the vaccine’s protection against serious illness dropped among those vaccinated in January.

“There is a concern that the vaccine may start to wane in its effectiveness,” Collins said. “And Delta is a nasty one for us to try to deal with. The combination of those two means we may need boosters, maybe beginning first with health care providers, as well as people in nursing homes, and then gradually moving forward” with others.

Areas with low vaccination rates have been particularly hit hard with infections, such as Louisiana, Texas, Florida and Mississippi.

The rapidly escalating surge in infections across the US has caused a shortage of intensive care-unit beds, nurses and other front-line staff in virus hot spots that can no longer keep up with the flood of unvaccinated patients.

“That’s heartbreaking considering we never thought we would be back in that space again,” Collins said of rising US infections overall. “But here we are with the Delta variant.”