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 COVID-19 hospitalizations rose to record heights for a 19th straight
day, with nearly 113,000 coronavirus patients counted in U.S.
medical facilities nationwide on Wednesday, while 3,580 more
perished, the most yet in a single day.
The virus has claimed over 311,000 lives in the United States to
date, and health experts have warned of a deepening crisis this
winter as intensive care units (ICUs) fill up and hospital beds
spill over into hallways.
"We expect to have more dead bodies than we have spaces for them,"
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said at a briefing on Thursday,
adding that the country's second-largest city had fully exhausted
its ICU capacity.
The number of U.S. cases rose by at least 239,018 on Thursday,
according to a Reuters tally, the highest one-day increase since the
pandemic began, driving the number of known infections nationally to
more than 17 million.
The tolls mounted as U.S. regulators weighed whether to grant
emergency use authorization for a vaccine developed by Moderna Inc,
just a week after an earlier vaccine from Pfizer Inc and German
partner BioNTech SE won consent for mass distribution.
A panel of outside advisers to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration
overwhelmingly endorsed Moderna's vaccine candidate for emergency
use after a daylong meeting on Thursday.. FDA authorization could
come as soon as Friday.
Both vaccines require two doses, given three or four weeks apart,
for each person inoculated.
The initial 2.9 million doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine began
shipping on Sunday and were still making their way to hospitals
across the country and into the arms of doctors, nurses, and other
frontline medical professionals.
Some of the first shots were also going to residents and staff of
long-term care facilities. Other essential workers, senior citizens
and people with chronic health conditions will be next on the list.
BEDS IN CORRIDORS
It will take several months before vaccines are widely available to
the public on demand, and opinion polls have found many Americans
are hesitant about getting inoculated.
Some are distrustful of immunizations in general, and some are wary
of the unprecedented speed with which the first vaccines were
developed and rolled out - 11 months from the first documented U.S.
cases of COVID-19.
Health authorities have sought to reassure Americans that
large-scale clinical trials and rigorous scientific review found the
vaccines to be safe as well as highly effective at preventing
illness.
Those messages have been combined with urgent pleas for Americans to
remain diligent about social distancing and mask-wearing until
immunizations become widely available.
Data shows infections continuing to spread virtually unabated across
much of the country, apparently fueled by increased transmissions of
the virus as many Americans disregarded warnings to avoid social
gatherings and unnecessary travel over the Thanksgiving holiday last
month.
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 California has been hit
particularly hard in recent weeks, with many of
its hospitals reporting ICUs at or near
capacity, a dire situation that triggered a
renewal of sweeping stay-at-home orders across
much of the state.
"Hospitals and healthcare workers continue to be
stretched to the limit, as we continue to surge
beyond even what we anticipated. And we're not
even through the holidays yet," said Adam
Blackstone, a spokesman for the Hospital
Association of Southern California.
In San Bernardino County, where available ICU
space was down to zero, newly admitted patients
at Arrowhead Regional Medical Center were lined
up in beds in corridors waiting for care,
spokeswoman Justine Rodriguez told Reuters.
With the strain taking a growing toll on medical
staff, the race to expand vaccinations is seen
as critical to preventing a collapse of
healthcare systems.
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar
told CNBC on Thursday that 5.9 million Moderna
vaccine doses had been allotted for state
governments to receive and were ready to
distribute nationwide starting at the weekend.
The Moderna vaccine has less onerous cold
storage requirements than the Pfizer/BioNTech
shot, making it a better option for remote and
rural areas.
Nevertheless, ambivalence over the vaccine has
emerged even among pockets of healthcare workers
designated as first in line for inoculation.
"Some are on the fence. Some feel that we need
to get it done. It's split down the middle,"
Diego Montes Lopez, 28, a phlebotomist at Martin
Luther King Jr. Community Hospital in South Los
Angeles, said of co-workers after getting
injected himself.
But Dr. Simon Mates, an ICU co-medical director
at Dignity Health California Hospital Medical
Center in downtown Los Angeles, said the
physicians and nurses he knows view the vaccine
as having arrived at a crucial moment.
 "Our biggest concern was: 'What if one of us
gets sick?' But now with the vaccine, that
concern seems to be ebbing," said Mates, who
learned Wednesday that he had already received
the vaccine, rather than a placebo, as a
participant in the Pfizer trials. "It's one less
thing to worry about."
(Reporting by Susan Heavey, Sharon Bernstein,
Dan Whitcomb, Manas Mishra, Peter Szekely,
Richard Cowan, Susan Cornwell, Lucy Nicholson
and Anurag Maan; Writing by Daniel Trotta and
Steve Gorman; Editing by Steve Orlofsky, Bill
Berkrot, Grant McCool and Richard Pullin)
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