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Over the next 30 days alone, Covid-19 will kill about 60,000 people in the United States, which is more than all those who died during a decade of participation in the Vietnam War.
Or, to approximate it, almost twice as many as have died in Colombia since the pandemic began. This is how serious things are in this country, where this week all records of deaths (3,347 in a single day), infections and hospitalizations were broken.
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And it will get worse. According to Robert Redfield, director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), These are rates that are going to be sustained for at least three months and that could add another 200,000 fatalities to the 300,000 that have already been registered.
That is, half a million deaths in just one year. “The situation is very complicated. I would say that we are facing the most acute health emergency in our entire history, ”said Redfield.
Added to this delicate moment is the tremendous stress to which the country’s hospital system is being subjected. According to statistics from the Department for Health and Human Services, Thirty percent of the country’s medical centers have exceeded their capacity to care for patients in their Intensive Care Units. And that’s not counting the wave of hospitalizations to come as a result of the Thanksgiving Bridge, when millions of Americans defied lockdown recommendations and chose to visit loved ones. Or the one to come now that Christmas is approaching.
And it is no longer just the lack of beds or medical equipment in hospitals. Across the country, a shortage of doctors and nurses has begun to register, who after months of living under the stress of the pandemic have begun to throw in the towel.
An estimated 50 million people traveled on different modes of transportation for Thanksgiving. In the photo, the San Francisco airport.
JOHN G. MABANGLO. Eph
“Makes you want to cry. I receive patients who are dying, but they deny that covid-19 exists and say that it is just an invention of their political opponents. It’s demoralizing, ”says Diane Kenkel, a nurse from South Dakota, where Covid-19 is rampant.
In large part, that is one reason the pandemic is out of control in the country. Almost half of its inhabitants, according to recent surveys, do not believe in wearing masks or physical distancing to control its spread.. Or they think it was a fabrication by the Democrats to sink the re-election of outgoing President Donald Trump. A myth that was stimulated by the president himself and later picked up by republican authorities in many states. In fact, although this second wave of covid-19 has flooded the entire country, the most serious cases are occurring in rural areas and states controlled by members of this party.
From 35,000 daily infections during the worst moment of the first wave, it has risen to more than 200,000 today. And with that basis it is almost impossible to put the pandemic on the waist.
According to a recent AP survey, only 47% of Americans say they will get the vaccine once it is available.
Still, this week’s bad news was accompanied by good news when the board that advises the US Food and Food Administration (FDA) gave its go-ahead to the vaccine produced by Pfizer. And on Friday night the agency gave the order for it to start being distributed throughout the country. President Trump promised via Twitter that the first doses will be administered “in less than 24 hours.”
But here’s another problem emanating from the same disinformation campaign that Trump deployed, which spent months minimizing the lethality of Covid-19. According to a recent survey by the AP agency, only 47 percent of Americans say they will get the vaccine once it is available. Another 27 percent don’t know if they will, and 26 percent strongly oppose getting their arm punctured.
“If only 50 percent of people get vaccinated, that would leave 165 million people exposed to a virus that will continue to kill people for several more years. The task now is to convince people that they are safe and that the return to normalcy, to a large extent, depends on all of us putting it on, ”says Michal Tal, an immunology expert at Stanford University.
SERGIO GÓMEZ MASERI
EL TIEMPO correspondent
Washington
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