In the United States, COVID-19 deaths have risen to an average of more than 2,200 per day, in line with the frightening peak reached last April, and an average of 200,000 daily cases have been obscured for the first time, the crisis certainly only for Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year. may be exacerbated by its consequences.
Virtually every state reports spikes when vaccinations appear in the United States in days
“What we’re literally doing now is going to be a matter of life and death for many of our citizens,” Washington Governor Jay Inslee said Tuesday as he extended restrictions on businesses and social gatherings, including a ban on eating and drinking indoors in restaurants and bars. .
While the imminent arrival of the vaccine gives hope, he said: “We have to face the reality right now, and the reality is that we are in a very serious situation with the pandemic.”
In other parts of the country, the governor of North Carolina ordered a 10-hour curfew, and Southern California and San Joaquin Valley authorities sent out a mass cell phone text alert on Tuesday informing millions of the virus’s rapid spread and urging them to abide by the state of residence. home orders.
The virus is blamed for more than 285,000 deaths and 15 million confirmed infections in the United States.
Many Americans ignored warnings not to travel through Thanksgiving Day and ignored other safety precautions, whether out of stubbornness, ignorance, or complacency. On Saturday night, police arrested nearly 160 people in Southern California, many of whom were unmasked, at a Palmdale house party held without the knowledge of the house owner.
Prior to his death on Friday due to complications from COVID-19, Larry Dixon, a 78-year-old former state alabama senator, asked his wife from his hospital bed to send a warning. “Honey, we messed it up. We just dropped our guard. … We need to tell people it’s real,” lung doctor Dr. David Thrasher quoted his friend as saying.
Although Dixon was conscientious about masks and social distancing, he met a friend at a restaurant called a “prayer meeting,” and three of them fell ill, Thrasher said.
“The messages need to be critically consistent,” Birx said at a Wall Street Journal CEO conference on Tuesday. “I think we need to be more consistent in dealing with the myths that exist – that COVID doesn’t really exist, or that deaths are somehow replaceable, or that hospital care is for other illnesses, not COVID that actually masks you.”
On Thursday, the Food and Drug Administration’s advisory board is expected to approve the urgent use of Pfizer COVID-19, and shots could begin almost immediately thereafter. Britain began releasing the Pfizer vaccine on Tuesday, and it became the first Western country to start mass vaccinations.
Nevertheless, any vaccination campaign will take months, and U.S. health experts warn that infections will continue to rise in the coming weeks as people gather for the holidays.
California officials painted a terrible picture as more than 22,000 residents test positive for the coronavirus every day, and about 12% of them inevitably show up in hospitals in two to three weeks. They fear that the spike will soon flood the intensive care units. The Medical Center for the Health Systems at the University of Southern California at Riverside went so far as to open an ICU in a container.
North Carolina has reached new highs in hospital on the sixth day in a row and in 11 of the past 12 days with the help of COVID-19. The number of patients has doubled in the past month, to nearly 2,400.
In Georgia, the number of confirmed or suspected coronavirus infections has risen to more than 70% in the past week, and hospitals are alerting them to their ability to absorb new COVID-19 patients.
The state reports an average of more than 5,000 confirmed or suspected cases per day. Georgia still ranks only 44th in the last 14 days among most new cases per capita among states because infections are spreading so fast everywhere else.
More than 2,500 COVID-19 patients were hospitalized Monday nationwide. This is below the summer peak of 3200, but is more than twice the last low in mid-October.
“We’re actually reversing the gains we made after the summer surge,” said epidemiologist Amber Schmidtke, who analyzes Georgia’s COVID-19 numbers on a daily basis.
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Pane reported from Boise, Idaho. La Corte reported from the Olympics in Washington.
