U.S. Reaches 48M COVID Cases & 775K Deaths The Day Before Thanksgiving

Here's something for which not to be thankful. The day before Thanksgiving, the United States surpassed 48 million COVID-19 cases and 775,000 deaths. According to Johns Hopkins University, there have been 48,076,108 COVID-19 cases resulting in the deaths of 775,144 Americans representing a mortality rate of 1.6%.

It took 11 days to from 47 million to 48 million cases after taking 12 days to go from 46 to 47 million cases. With the holidays upon us, I suspect we will be adding a million new cases much faster. We will certainly surpass 50 million cases in December. If there is a silver lining is that deaths have been slowing down. It took a full three weeks to go from 750,000 to 775,000 deaths after taking 17 days to go from 700,000 to 725,000 deaths and 16 days to go from 725,000 to 750,000 deaths. Nevertheless, we will very likely surpass 800,000 deaths before the end of 2021. 

Although nearly 200 million Americans have been fully vaccinated it represents less than 60% of the eligible population (59.76%) as we have a lower vaccination rate than Monaco, Turkey, Latvia, Greece and Sri Lanka among too many other countries. I strongly suspect that most Americans who are getting vaccinated are getting booster shots (and I will soon be among them) as the CDC has now recommended all adults get a booster shot as of last Friday. But so long as there is vaccine resistance we can expect a million new cases every 5 to 15 days for the foreseeable future.