Hospitalizations of people with COVID-19 have climbed past 100,000, which will force health care systems to ration care, CNBC reported Wednesday.
CNBC said it relied on data from the The COVID Tracking Project, a database run by the editorial staff at the left-leaning The Atlantic magazine. It said hospitalizations previously had not surpassed 60,000.
The Association of American Medical Colleges earlier this week announced it is encouraging all hospital facilities to enact ''Crisis Standards of Care.''
Dr. Janis Orlowski, chief health care officer of the AAMC, described the declaration as a system of rationing care.
The objective is ''to provide the best care possible to the largest number of people with the resources available,'' the AAMC said.
Declaring that hospitals in El Paso, Texas, Utah and North Dakota have already reached the crisis point, she added that ''most hospitals are going to be there in the next two weeks'' if current trends persist.
She blamed the increase in hospitalizations as driven by Thanksgiving travel and gatherings.
However, the seven-day average of daily new cases of novel coronavirus infection have trended lower since Nov. 25, according to worldometers.info. Since reaching a high of 179,943, they have fallen 164,761 as of Tuesday.
However, Tuesday saw the single-day number jump to 184,184.
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