WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - After a brief interval, hospitalizations of Coronavirus-infected patients in the United States bounced back to a new record level.
As per the latest update published by COVID Tracking Project on Tuesday, a total of 115,351 patients are currently admitted in the U.S. hospitals with the deadly disease. This is the 20th consecutive day that the country is surpassing 100,000 hospitalizations.
21,899 of the COVID patients in the country are admitted in Intensive care units, and 7,776 others are in ventilator, according to the U.S. collaborative volunteer-run effort to track the pandemic.
Meanwhile the national Covid test positivity rate fell further to 10 percent, which marks a sharp drop from more than 16 percent reported last week.
The outbreak continues to worsen in California, where 18,359 people are hospitalized with the disease.
With 1485 additional fatalities reporting in the last 24 hours, the total U.S. death toll from the deadly disease rose to 319,466, as per latest data from the Johns Hopkins University.
During the same period, 178,191 new cases were reported across the country, taking the total number of patients infected with the disease to 18043824.
39.75 percent of the infected people in the United States are still sick, while 58.48 percent of them have recovered, according to COVID Tracking Project.
COVID-19 deaths are rising in 19 states. The 7-day average for the country now stands at a record 2,631.
The country's top infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci said that it is 'certainly possible' that the outbreak of a new variant of coronavirus reported in the U.K. has entered the United States.
'That's certainly possible I mean, when you have this amount of spread within a place like the UK, that you really need to assume that it's here already,' said Fauci, who is the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease.
It certainly is not the dominant strain, he told ABC.
Operation Warp Speed chief operating officer Gen. Gustave F. Perna said in a media briefing that he expects about 7.9 million Moderna and Pfizer vaccines to be distributed this week.
Over the weekend, pharmaceutical company Moderna was granted emergency use authorization for its COVID-19 vaccine by the Food and Drug Administration, and its doses have already started leaving distribution centers.
Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX