Just as the United States is experiencing a surge in coronavirus cases due to Thanksgiving, it is faced with an even more ominous holiday in Christmas.
All of the risk factors that were in play during Thanksgiving, such as exposure during travel, large gatherings indoors, and a lack of physical distancing and mask-wearing at those gatherings, could be worse during Yuletide.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warned Monday that Christmas could be worse than Thanksgiving “because it is a longer holiday.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised people in November that the “safest way to celebrate Thanksgiving” was to “celebrate at home with the people you live with.” Despite that, nearly 9.5 million passengers traveled via airline during Thanksgiving, according to the Transportation Safety Administration. That number will likely rise during Christmas, based on past trends. The TSA reports that in 2019, nearly 26 million traveled during Thanksgiving, while 43.8 million traveled at Christmas.
“It’s not just being in the plane, it’s the whole process of travel,” said Dr. Marissa Levine, a former state health commissioner in Virginia. “It’s getting to the airport, what happens in the airport before you get on the plane, what happens after you get out of the plane at the airport. That’s an opportunity for people to mix together.”
More people traveling will also mean more large gatherings at home. On Monday, Fauci advised that gatherings be limited to 10 people. But the real problem, he said, was where those people were coming from.
“It’s not only the number, it’s the people who might be coming in from out of town,” Fauci said. “You want to make sure you don’t have people who just got off a plane or a train. That’s even more risky than the absolute number.”
More people traveling via airplane during Christmas all but guarantees more large gatherings with people from out of town.
And it is during these gatherings that people tend to let their guard down.
“We get together in situations where wearing a mask would be important, but people often don’t wear their mask, and we get closer to each other,” said Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director at the American Public Health Association. “More exposure in an unprotected way will cause more cases.”
Benjamin added, “We’re expecting surges to occur … it will be additive to what we saw from Thanksgiving. We are beginning to see the fallout from Thanksgiving now, but it will get worse.”
Cases, hospitalizations, and deaths have already reached new highs, according to the COVID Tracking Project. On Monday, the seven-day average for new COVID-19 cases was 196,882, for hospitalizations, it was 100,814, and for deaths, it was 2,204.
Many hospitals are overburdened. In New Mexico, beds in intensive care units were at 103% capacity last week. In Arizona, 90% of ICU beds are occupied, 43% of them with COVID-19 patients. Arizona last saw numbers that high when cases peaked in July.
Benjamin warned that the country shouldn’t expect the rollout of the coronavirus vaccine to stave off a Christmas surge.
“There are 21 million healthcare workers and 3 million people in long-term care facilities,” he said. “We have to dose 24 million people, and we only have 3 million doses at first. It won’t make a dent in the surge.”
Levine worries that a Christmas surge could interfere with distributing the vaccine.
“If this spike goes higher, that does not bode well for vaccination,” she said. “We may have so many of our healthcare workers working in healthcare settings taking care of sick people, then we may not have enough people needed to get vaccinations done.”
