The US has 'screaming level' of Covid-19 transmission, expert says, as country adds nearly 4 million cases this month - CNN

a thousand per day fewer hospitalizations in the United States," he said.

"If we stay put now and we mask up and we get vaccines into arms as quickly as possible, we can start to get a hold of this pandemic."

Still, Covid-related deaths are nearing 400,000 in the United States and multiple US states have now reported cases of a new Covid-19 variant first detected in the UK.

"Even though on a one-to-one basis, it's not more virulent, meaning it doesn't make you more sick or more likely to die, just by numbers alone, the more cases you have, the more hospitalizations you're going to have, and the more hospitalizations you have, the more deaths you're going to have," Fauci said.

A new Covid-19 variant is now "increasingly being found in multiple counties throughout California," state health officials announced Sunday in a news release.

The variant, known as 452R, is different from the B.1.1.7 variant first detected in the United Kingdom, health officials say.

Erica Pan.

US approaching 400,000 Covid-19 deaths

Just a little more than halfway into January, the US has added a staggering 3.9 million new Covid-19 cases and more than 51,000 virus-related deaths.

To put that into perspective, that's more than double the country's Covid-19 hospitalization peak in spring, according to data from the project.

In their latest briefing, the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation projected hospitals in many states "will be under severe stress in the next four weeks."

That's already been the case in different parts across the country.

Los Angeles County -- the epicenter of California's Covid-19 crisis -- has battled a brutal surge of infections, hospitalizations and deaths for weeks now.