US coronavirus: More than 114,000 new infections are reported, breaking a new daily record

Health experts had warned weeks ago that the nation’s daily cases would eventually reach six digits, but that alarming reality hit sooner than expected. Still, the situation is expected to get worse, with health experts now predicting that Covid-19’s death toll could reach 266,000 by the end of November.

16 states set new records for hospitalizations

Covid-19 hospitalizations reached all-time highs in 16 states Wednesday, according to the Covid Tracking Project: Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

“Our number of hospitalized people goes up every day. These are a lot of Kentuckians who are fighting for their lives,” Gov. Andy Beshear said Wednesday. “There’s a lot of pain out there and it’s hitting everybody.”

The state’s health commissioner, Dr. Steven Stack, said he’s concerned “not that we will first run out of bed space but that we may not have enough health care workers to staff all those beds.”

Kansas is suffering another “very difficult week for virus spread” — especially with rising hospitalizations, Gov. Laura Kelly said Wednesday.

Last week, the closest available ICU bed to one rural hospital was about a six-hour drive away, Kelly said.

And at least 1,060 new Covid-19 deaths were reported Thursday, according to Johns Hopkins.

The battle over a shutdown

El Paso, Texas, reached a record-high number of hospitalizations Wednesday, with at least 1,041 Covid-19 patients hospitalized in the city.

County Judge Ricardo Samaniego, the top government official in the county, ordered a two-week shutdown of all nonessential services last week. Without such measures, he said, “we will see unprecedented levels of deaths.”

But the Texas attorney general said his office has filed a motion for a temporary injunction to stop the judge’s “unlawful lockdown order, which flies in the face of Gov. Greg Abbott’s executive orders on COVID-19.”

Abbott said Samaniego “illegally” shut down businesses. He said the county judge “made it clear that he had not been enforcing existing protocols allowed under law” that could help curb the virus “while allowing businesses to safely open.”

Baker also announced new restrictions around gatherings and a new closing time for indoor facilities, theaters and other venues.

Connecticut announced new capacity limits on restaurants, religious ceremonies and indoor event spaces.

Those who can’t work from home may be at higher risk of getting Covid-19

A CDC-led team looked at 314 US adults: 153 were symptomatic and had positive Covid-19 PCR tests and 161 were symptomatic people with negative test results.

Of 248 participants who reported their telework status in the two weeks before illness onset, those who had positive Covid-19 test results were more likely to report going exclusively to a workplace.

The findings highlight socioeconomic differences among participants who did and did not telework, the authors wrote. Non-White employees and those who earned less had less opportunity to telework.

“Allowing and encouraging the option to work from home or telework, when possible, is an important consideration for reducing SARS-CoV-2 transmission,” the authors wrote.

When teleworking isn’t possible, worker safety measures should be scaled up, they said.