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And those numbers don't include the anticipated surge in cases associated with travel or gatherings over the Thanksgiving holiday. Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of the top infectious disease doctors in the country, says the holiday season will coincide with a very challenging period for the country.

\"Given where we are right now coming off the Thanksgiving season, we have not yet seen the full blunt and and and the effect of the traveling and the congregating. That should be sometime probably next week, or a week and a half. Doctors, nurses, and public health officials around the country have been begging for their communities to comply with public health measures like wearing masks and avoiding indoor gatherings to reduce the pressure on the hospitals and staff that have been treating COVID-19 patients for months,\" Fauci said at a Wall Street Journal summit on Tuesday.

Independent advisers to the Food and Drug Administration are set to discuss emergency authorization for the COVID-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer this week but the limited supply of the vaccine won't have an impact on the widespread number of cases, so Fauci and other public officials say it's critically important to double down on protections such as wearing a mask, staying at home when possible, and avoiding indoor gatherings.

\"PHOTO:
Allison Dinner/AFP via Getty Images
PHOTO: Doors lead to the Covid-19 ICU unit at UMass Memorial Hospital in Worcester, Mass., Dec. 4, 2020.
>

Andrew Carrol, an overnight hospital physician helping surge teams in Phoenix, said hospitals are seeing the same emergency cases that need intensive care treatment on top of COVID-19 patients. He said the hospital he's working in is \"bursting at the seams\" and trying to bring in personnel from out of state.

\"We're running out of ICU beds. Now I don't mean just beds, we're running out of ICU teams, running out of those specialized personnel that helps take care of those people. So we're running out of capacity and so are a lot of other hospitals in Arizona,\" he told ABC News.

\"We're running out of people and the people we have are running out of energy.\"

A doctor in Arizona says hospitals are \"running out of ICU teams\" for COVID patients, and urges people to \"take the personal responsibility\" by skipping holiday gatherings. https://t.co/7W1GOcY1nZ pic.twitter.com/pgMTBwQLVT

— ABC News (@ABC) December 9, 2020

ABC News' Josh Margolin, Arielle Mitropolous, and Anne Flaherty contributed to this report.

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