While the American people are Increasingly hopeful that a vaccine will soon begin to become widely available to prevent infection from the novel coronavirus, a vaccine won’t help the nation through what will be this increasing surge of the pandemic in the next weeks, according to the White House coronavirus coordinator.

The United States has recorded more than 14.6 million cases of COVID-19, including more than 280,000 deaths from the disease. Cases and deaths have sharply accelerated in recent weeks and predictions are for that trend to continue through the holiday season.

“I think what’s really critical for people to understand is our hospitals normally in the fall and winter run between 80 percent and 90 percent full. Just caring for our routine health. So when you add 10, 15, 20 percent COVID-19 patients on top of that, that’s what puts them at the breaking point,” said Dr Deborah Birx. “Because our normal health care system runs at 80 percent to 90 percent full throughout the fall. I have seen — and part of the reason I traveled, I have seen really successful examples, and that’s part of the reason of going out is to find out what is not working but what also is working. We’ve seen in Chicago, Illinois, hospitals come together and create a unified dashboard so they know at any one time for every single patient that comes into the emergency room where there is a bed that serves the needs of that individual patient.”

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