U.S. Coronavirus: U.S. hit record for daily deaths. Winter will be “horrible” before you see “some light,” the expert says

On Monday alone, more than 1.1 million people went through airport security checks across the country, the Transportation Security Administration said.

“The next two months are going to be terrible,” said Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a professor of medicine at George Washington University. “We’ll lose 3,000, maybe more people a day, probably until well into February. And then we should start to see some light.”

And while ongoing vaccinations continue to offer hope, the process takes longer than many health officials expected, and months are likely to pass before the country begins to see a significant impact, experts said.

Vaccines are slower than officials expected

But Trump administration officials told CNN that vaccine distribution is on track and blamed the gap for a lag in data submission.

However, Dr Celine Gounder, a member of the Biden-Harris Covid-19 transition advisory board, said vaccinations are moving “clearly not an acceptable pace”.

“We’ve basically vaccinated two million people in two weeks, so that’s a million people a week,” Gounder said. “At this rate, it would take more than a decade to vaccinate all Americans with the Pfizer and Modern vaccine.”

The country’s current vaccination data is certainly not where “we wanted to get to the end of December,” Dr. Anthony Fauci told CNN.

“Even if you don’t count … how much could be less? So we’re below where we want to be,” said Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Disease. Infectious. “I think as we get into January, we’ll see an increase in momentum that … I hope it allows us to pick up the expected pace that we’ve been talking about.”

The faster this happens, the faster the country can begin to approach an “open season” of vaccinations, where vaccines can be widely available to the American public, Fauci said.

“When you get to the point, where you can basically say that anyone who wants to be vaccinated can get vaccinated, that’s when you really turn the dynamics of the outbreak,” he added.

Variant of the United Kingdom discovered in Colorado

The case was confirmed in a 20-year-old man who is currently in solitary confinement and has no history of travel, officials said.

“There are many things we don’t know about this new variant of Covid-19, but UK scientists warn the world that it is significantly more contagious,” Colorado Gov. Jared Polis said in a statement.

And the variant is “almost certain” in several states, according to one expert.

“I think we’ll see evidence in the next few days,” said Dr. Atul Gawande, a member of Biden-Harris’ Coviden-19 transition advisory committee.

The unknown history of the Colorado man’s travels means that “that person picked her up in the community,” Gawande said.

“The real question is exactly how prevalent it is,” he added. “If it has spread, how, to what extent is it dominant?”

“We know it’s a more contagious variant and that’s a serious concern if it’s just starting to spread, as our hospitals and ICU, in particular, are already filling up.”

So far, at least 26 countries have reported cases of the variant, CNN reports.

More than 2 million children have had Covid-19

Meanwhile, cases of Covid-19 in children continue to rise in the US.

A new report from the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association said there were more than 178,000 new cases of Covid-19 among children in the week ending Dec. 24.

This brings the total number of child cases to over two million. Children now account for about 12.4% of all Covid-19 cases in the US.

Between December 10 and December 24, the report said there was a 22% increase in cases among children.