Despite a steady growth in coronavirus deaths, a medical expert says the United States now has an opportunity to "get a hold of the pandemic."
"We're going to see a lot of deaths in the next two months but there is a ray of sunshine," Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a George Washington University medical professor and CNN medical analyst, said Monday on "New Day."
"Over the last four days for the first time in months, we've seen a steady decline ... a thousand per day fewer hospitalizations in the United States," he said. "We've seen the same trend in new cases."
Nationally, hospitalizations are now around 124,000 per day, down from 132,000 a few weeks ago. Reiner also said testing has increased in recent weeks, but test positivity has dropped to around 11% from a peak of 14% a few weeks ago.
"All of those metrics point to the conclusion that we may have passed the peak," he said. "If we stay put now and we mask up and we get vaccines into arms as quickly as possible, we can start to get a hold of this pandemic."
Still, Covid-related deaths are nearing 400,000 in the United States, and the country passed the 24 million mark in total cases, according to Johns Hopkins University data. More than half -- 60% -- of all Covid-19 cases in the United states have been reported since Election Day, according to a CNN analysis of Johns Hopkins University data.
California, the current epicenter of the pandemic in the US, became the first state on Monday to record more than 3 million Covid-19 cases, according to data from Johns Hopkins and the Covid Tracking Project. The number of Covid-19 cases in California has tripled in just the past two months.
And multiple US states have now reported cases of a new Covid-19 variant first detected in the UK. The number of cases of this variant are likely to "double every week," according to Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former Food and Drug Administration commissioner.
"In about five weeks, this is going to start to take over," Gottlieb said during an interview on CBS' "Face the Nation."
"The only backstop against this new variant is the fact that we will have a lot of infection by then so there'll be a lot of immunity in the population, and we will be vaccinating more people," he added. "But this really changes the equation and I think what we're looking at is a relentless strike from this virus, heading into the spring."
"We could have persistently high levels of infection in the spring until we finally get enough people vaccinated."
And while Covid-19 variants are not necessarily more deadly, they still can cause more deaths, Dr. Anthony Fauci told NBC on Sunday.
"Even though on a one-to-one basis, it's not more virulent, meaning it doesn't make you more sick or more likely to die, just by numbers alone, the more cases you have, the more hospitalizations you're going to have, and the more hospitalizations you have, the more deaths you're going to have," Fauci said.
A new Covid-19 variant is now "increasingly being found in multiple counties throughout California," state health officials announced Sunday in a news release.
The variant, known as 452R, is different from the B.1.1.7 variant first detected in the United Kingdom, health officials say. As testing for variants has ramped up in California, the 452R version has been identified more frequently since November and has been identified in large outbreaks in Santa Clara County.
"It's too soon to know if this variant will spread more rapidly than others, but it certainly reinforces the need for all Californians to wear masks and reduce mixing with people outside their immediate households to help slow the spread of the virus," said California Department of Public Health epidemiologist Dr. Erica Pan.
Fortunately, the number of deaths has basically stabilized. With the development of vaccines, although 400,000 deaths have occurred, most people still do not pay attention to them and believe that they will not be infected with COVID-19 as long as they are vaccinated. This idea is extremely wrong. Vaccines only serve a preventive effect and can not guarantee that they will not be infected. I hope they still have to do basic protection, so that is the fundamental way to solve the problem.