The American Academy of Pediatrics announcedlate Monday that the number of children contracting COVID-19 has soared to unprecedented levels, with nearly 200,000 new cases in the month of October. In just one week late last month, 61,000 new cases were reported in kids – more than any other week during the pandemic.
In terms of overall cases, 18 states have broken daily records for new infections in the past week, and hospitalizations are up in 43 states. Since the start of the pandemic, over 9.2 million cases have been confirmed in the U.S. and more than 231,000 Americans have died due to the virus, according to a tally from Johns Hopkins University.
Former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb said Tuesday the U.S. is likely to see "significant" COVID-19 spread nationwide in the coming months.
"We're entering a very difficult period with this pandemic, and this is probably gonna be the densest phase of the pandemic," he said on CNBC.
"Now, we're much better prepared to deal with it so I don't think that we're gonna see the excess death that we saw with the first wave of this pandemic when it struck New York ... but the sheer fact that were gonna be infecting so many people right now is probably gonna mean that the death toll gets well above 1,000 for a sustained period of time, and so it's a very grim couple of months that we face," he said.
Things will get better in 2021," but we need to hunker down and be careful over the next couple of months," Gottlieb said.