As of Monday, December 28, 2020, Montana reports 79,999 confirmed COVID-19 cases, with 224 new cases reported in the last day: 46 in Missoula County, 42 in Lewis & Clark County, 29 in Yellowstone County, 21 in Silver Bow County, 19 in Jefferson County, 18 in Cascade County, 17 in Flathead County, 14 in Gallatin County, and more new cases in 9 more Montana counties. The number of active coronavirus cases in Montana is 5,591. Statewide, 3,464 people have been hospitalized, and 213 people are being treated in Montana hospitals for COVID-19. The most active cases are in Yellowstone, Cascade, and Lewis & Clark County. 927 people have died in Montana of COVID-19. Three more deaths and thirteen more hospitalizations have been reported in the last day. Nationwide, more than 335,000 Americans have died of COVID-19. There have been 19,300,000 cases of coronavirus in the US, and counting.
A top health advisor to President-elect Biden is warning of the ‘worst’ January ever from a post-Christmas Covid surge. Despite the rollout of two new vaccines, the pandemic is accelerating and the United States should brace itself for “one of the worst months in this nation’s history in January,” said Dr. Celine Gounder. That dire warning came as the number of Covid-19 infections rose past 19.2 million after Christmas and the number of deaths from coronavirus neared 334,000. Gounder, a member of the Biden’s Covid-19 advisory board, described a nightmarish scenario in which local health officials are forced to erect field hospitals because hallways and even some parking lots are already packed with sick patients. And an even bigger crisis, Gounder said, will be finding enough doctors and nurses to treat everybody. “You can’t stand up new doctors and nurses the way you can field hospitals,” Gounder said. “You can’t just create them out of thin air.”
Lawmakers said they are relieved that President Donald Trump finally signed the $2.3 trillion Covid-19 relief and government funding package on Sunday that his administration had helped negotiate — and which Trump nearly torpedoed with some last-minute objections. Meanwhile Trump, who has been spending the holidays at his Florida estate, went golfing again.
Chinese citizen journalist Zhang Zhan has been jailed for what the Chinese government calls ‘provoking trouble’ with her Wuhan reporting. Zhang Zhan, 37, was one of several citizen journalists whose firsthand accounts from when the virus first emerged nearly a year ago painted a more dire picture of the early outbreak than the government’s official narrative. Zhang, a former lawyer, arrived in Wuhan in early February from her home in Shanghai to document in a series of online posts how the city was holding up against the new, deadly virus. Some of her posts were critical of the Chinese government’s response.
Zhang was detained in May and accused of spreading false information, giving interviews to foreign media, disrupting social order and attacking the government. Criticism of China’s early handling of the crisis has been heavily censored inside the country with whistleblowers silenced and state media hailing China’s success in containing the virus. In the early days of the outbreak, authorities reprimanded several Wuhan doctors for rumor-mongering after they tried to alert the public about the new virus. The best known of the them, Li Wenliang, later died of Covid-19 and became a national hero. Several other citizen journalists who reported out of Wuhan during the early pandemic also appear to have been targeted.