A medical technician at a testing center, Houston, Texas, July 7, (Callaghan O’Hare/Reuters)

The US daily death toll in the Coronavirus pandemic has surged past 4,000 for the first time.

On Thursday, 4,085 fatalities were recorded, with 274,703 cases.

Almost 4,000 deaths were reported yesterday, taking the overall toll to 369,068.

The US averaged about 228,400 daily cases over the week up to Thursday, a record that is almost 3 1/2 times the summer peak in late July.

Confirmed cases are 21,879,748, more than double that of India, with the second-highest infections in the world. Hospitalizations are at a record 131,889, with 23,886 patients in intensive care.

California, with the third-highest death toll in the US, reported more than 1,000 fatalities in just two days. In Los Angeles County, ambulance crews have been waiting for hours with patients outside hospitals, as one person dies every eight minutes on average.

Texas has reported record hospitalizations on each weekday since Sunday.

Clayton Dalton, an emergency physician in New Mexico, summarizes:

Some of those patients will get sick enough to need treatment in the hospital. Will we have room for them? Or will some people die simply for want of space and providers to tend to them?

The solidarity I’ve seen among my frontline colleagues has been extraordinary, but I worry about the moral injury of fighting this pandemic in the face of fragmented leadership, petty politicization and a simple lack of critical equipment and supplies.

Of 29.4 million vaccine doses distributed, about 5.9 million have been administered, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).