The coronavirus continues to increase in hot spots around the US, prompting drastic measures across the country. A city in South Carolina is urging people to pray that the virus be subdued, a hospital in Texas is bringing in military medical personnel, and morgues are running out of space in Phoenix.
A record number of confirmed infections and deaths re-emerged in the southern and western states, with hospitals on the edge and fears worldwide that the resurgence of the pandemic is just beginning.
Texas reported 10,000 new cases Thursday for the third consecutive day and an additional 129 deaths. The state has seen a third of its more than 3,400 total deaths from COVID-19 in the first two weeks of July alone.
David J. Phillip / AP
The Florida Department of Health confirmed 11,466 new cases of COVID-19 on Friday, bringing the state total to 327,241. 128 new deaths of Florida residents were also announced, bringing the number of deaths of residents statewide to 4,805. On Thursday, the state hit another sinister record, with 156 deaths from the virus.
South Carolina confirmed 69 deaths, more than double any other day. In Louisiana, where authorities thought they had contained the virus earlier this year only to become a hot spot again, more than 2,000 new confirmed infections a day were averaged over the past week.
Many of the governors who lead the states with the highest growing number refused to order masks in public or prevented local officials from doing so. While some of them have changed course, including the Republican governor of Arkansas, and at least 25 states now have mask rules, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp prohibited cities and counties of requiring facial coatings and then sued Atlanta to prevent the city from challenging his order.
The capital of Georgia and 14 other cities had ordered the use of masks, but the Republican governor has argued that no local directive can be more or less restrictive than its state mandates.
“How can we serve our local needs when our state ties our hands behind our backs and then says, ‘Ignore the advice of experts?'” Savannah Mayor Van Johnson told reporters. Then he added: “If you don’t want to protect us, give us an opportunity to protect us.”
Meanwhile, Arizona has been so affected by the virus that the metropolitan Phoenix medical examiner’s office has purchased portable storage coolers and ordered more to handle an influx of bodies, reminiscent of New York City in the peak of the pandemic earlier this year. .
The usual deposit at the Arizona agency morgue was 63% full on Thursday. Marcy Flanagan, executive director of the Maricopa County Department of Public Health, said many funeral homes are at capacity and cannot accept more bodies.
In Utah, a county meeting on school masks was suspended early because the meeting itself violated health guidelines, reports “CBS This Morning” national correspondent David Begnaud.
In Texas, the increasing number is affecting large cities like Houston, as well as smaller communities along the border with Mexico. This month, Hidalgo County, about 220 miles south of San Antonio on the border, has reported more deaths than Harris County in Houston.
Dr. Ivan Meléndez, the Hidalgo County public health authority, said it is not uncommon for the body of a COVID-19 patient to lie on a gurney for 10 hours before he can withdraw from overcrowded hospitals where the intensive care space is falling short.
“I was a flight surgeon in the Iraq war, but it is very different when the person you are putting in a body bag is your next-door neighbor for 50 years, your mother’s best friend,” Meléndez told the correspondent for CBS News, Janet Shamlian.
Melendez, who recovered from COVID-19, told Shamlian that emotions are intensifying for patients, their loved ones, and front-line doctors and nurses.
“You know, I think you can imagine that we all cry every day,” he said.
Elsewhere in the second-largest state, health officials in San Antonio also used refrigerated trailers to store the dead, and soldiers prepared to take over a COVID-19 wing of a Houston hospital.
A team of 86-person Army doctors, nurses and support personnel were establishing a nursing station at United Memorial Medical Center and expected to begin treating up to 40 patients in the coming days.
Some of the soldiers across the country wore their uniforms. Others wore medical uniforms attached with strips of surgical tape that had their ranks, names, and medical titles.
“This facility, which works with the United States Army, is something we ask for,” said US Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, a Democrat from Houston, standing near the soldiers as they worked. “We have exhausted the medical staff for whom we are so grateful, but we did not have enough.”
In South Carolina, where the coronavirus crisis was worsening, the Mayor of Charleston asked for spiritual help.
“We turn to God at a time like this,” said Mayor John Tecklenburg.
Declaring a day of prayer and remembrance in what has been nicknamed the Holy City for centuries by the number of church steeples dotting its colonial horizon, Tecklenburg was surrounded by pastors of various faiths who prayed for the dead, the sick, their families and medical care. workers, vaccine-seeking scientists, and politicians.
Charleston is one of the most important points in a state that is among the worst in the nation for the rate of new cases. South Carolina is a microcosm of how the virus has developed in the United States in recent months. Almost 39% of the more than 62,000 known cases in the state have been diagnosed in the past two weeks.
South Carolina has established COVID-19 hospitalization records almost every day this month. The 69 deaths reported Thursday exceeded 1,000 people killed by the virus, the 25th state to cross that grim threshold.
More than 13.5 million infections have been confirmed worldwide and more than 588,000 have died, according to a count by Johns Hopkins University. The numbers are likely to be higher for various reasons, including limited evidence.
.
