EMERGENCY ROOM

When emergencies occur, you may not know where to go and what level of care you need. And sometimes, a hospital is not always the most accessible option.

At least six homeless people died during the winter storm in February, and as the weather cools down many homeless people are in danger of freezing to death.

The most wonderful time of the year also has a reputation for being among the most dangerous, as it’s traditionally responsible for approximately 16,000 injuries annually stemming from Christmas decorating activities.

Mario Tama | Getty ImagesNearly 3,000 people in the U.S. are dying every day, on average, of Covid-19 as top health officials warn that the worst is yet to come. Over the past week, the country has reported an average of more than 247,200 new cases every day, up 27% from a week ago, according to Hopkins data. "We're going to continue to see mortality in the 2,500-5,000 a day range," Redfield told the McClatchy news agency in an interview. Redfield warned Friday that the violent storming of the U.S. Capitol by supporters of President Donald Trump on Wednesday will make the outbreak worse. More than 22.1 million doses have been distributed, according to the data, but just 6.7 million have been administered.

Patients lie on stretchers in a hallway in the overloaded Emergency Room at Providence St. Mary Medical Center amid a surge in COVID-19 patients in Southern California on January 5, 2021 in Apple Valley, California. A record number of people died in the U.S. from Covid on Tuesday and Wednesday, when a mob of angry Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol during a riot. A record 3,733 people died from the virus on Tuesday, followed by 3,865 deaths Wednesday, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. Over 361,200 people in the U.S. have died of the disease since the virus arrived in the U.S. nearly 12 months ago. Since then, almost 1 in every 914 U.S. residents has died of the coronavirus since the pandemic began, according to a Reuters analysis.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has issued the first emergency use authorization for a new category of tests to help rapidly detect coronavirus. The main advantage of the antigen test is that it can provide results in minutes. There is a higher chance of false negatives with an antigen test and a negative result may need to be confirmed with an additional PCR test prior to further treatments. The antigen tests have a simpler design and can be produced at a lower cost than PCR tests. There have been a total of 8,408,788 coronavirus tests with 1,275,916 positive cases in the U.S. so far, according to the COVID Tracking Project.

Walgreens said Tuesday that it plans to open 15 drive-thru testing locations for the coronavirus across seven states, starting later this week. Walgreen's expansion of drive-thru testing marks the acceleration of an effort that the White House announced more than three weeks ago. These latest sites are not in CVS parking lots, but at larger locations that can support multiple lanes of cars. The rapid COVID-19 test, which the sites will use, delivers positive results in as little as five minutes and negative results within 13 minutes. Walgreens president Richard Ashworth said the pharmacy chain learned how to scale test sites after opening its first location in Massachusetts.

Here's a look, in charts, at where the U.S. stands in testing for the coronavirus. Third is Washington state, home of the first COVID-19 case detected in the U.S., at more than 1,000 test results per 100,000. While Texas has tested more than 50,000 people, according to data from the COVID Tracking Project, that's only 174 per 100,000 of its residents. But it's not the only state facing backlogs; South Carolina's state epidemiologist last week cited a shortage in the chemicals needed to process the tests to explain that state's lag. Based on Thursday's totals, the U.S. had tested 1,267,658 people, according to the COVID Tracking Project, which aggregates state-reported data.