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Iover and over again Mary Turner is on the verge of tears, her voice cracking. “I apologize for being so excited,” said the president of the Nurses United Nurses Union in Minnesota. Turner has been working in an intensive care unit for Covid patients at night since February. On Wednesday he will participate in a virtual round table. Your host: Joe Biden, the president-elect of the United States. “They touched me,” says Biden, fiddling with a handkerchief and rubbing his eyes.
It is a bitter testimony to the American healthcare system that Turner emits during the video slot. She recounts how her colleagues demonstrated for protective clothing. “There is something very wrong when nurses take to the streets asking for protective gear in the middle of a pandemic,” says Turner. “We have to act now, we have to act quickly,” he asks Biden. The number of cases increased, the hospitals were overcrowded, and many of his colleagues were afraid. “Our employers and the government are not supportive of us,” Turner said, recounting how his colleagues held the hands of dying patients as they cried because they couldn’t see their families.
He also regrets the lack of protective equipment. Sometimes a single N95 protective mask is worn eight to ten times. “We can’t stay safe by meeting these standards,” says Turner. There is no “second line of defense”, he warns, because there is only “us”: the nurses.
Source: dpa / dpa-infografik GmbH
By Wednesday (November 18), the United States had more than a quarter of a million deaths from Covid, according to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. More than 11.5 million Americans have contracted the virus. Even the White House sees a dramatic situation.
The United States is at a “dangerous point,” said Admiral Brett Giroir, a leading member of the president’s Corona task force. Giroir speaks of the “biggest increase in the number of cases”: “Our hospital admissions are increasing by 25 percent week after week, our deaths are increasing by 25 percent week after week.” All of this “is not moving in the right direction,” Giroir said. MSNBC transmitter.
“Bunkermentalität” triumphs
New York schools will close again this Thursday, as announced by Mayor Bill de Blasio. Meanwhile, even Covid testing is again a boon in the US In the capital, Washington, for example, people lined up for several hours at the beginning of the week.
The sparsely populated state of Montana (one million inhabitants in an area larger than Germany) imposed a mask requirement. Maryland Republican Governor Larry Hogan enacted restrictions on restaurants, religious establishments and gyms beginning Friday. Hogan was one of the few Republicans who consistently resisted the policies of Donald Trump, who devalued the wearing of masks and disparaged the virus.
The acting president is compounding the already precarious situation in America’s overwhelmed healthcare system. Trump (“I won the election”) refuses to initiate a proper transfer of power to his elected successor, Biden. Trump is thus creating a dangerous power vacuum: Biden and his transition team are unable to access the administration’s information, personnel, and capabilities, as has been the case with every change of president in the US.
While the future president is working hard on the pandemic and has long established his own task force, Trump is letting the administration largely slip away. The incumbent president takes almost no appointments: He briefly appeared last week during Veterans Day and for a press release on corona vaccination.
Donald Trump relaxes at his own golf club on the weekend instead of ruling
Quelle: The Washington Post via Getty Images Im / The Washington Post
Over the weekend, he played golf for two days, and since then he has only been seen on Twitter and in emails to his followers asking for donations. A “bunker mentality” prevails in the White House, depending on the president’s environment.
Vice President Mike Pence, who recently planned a sun vacation in Florida but then canceled at the last minute, has also largely disappeared.
Double shots needed
Pence heads, at least officially, the anti-corona task force in the White House. In the memory of his work there are above all optimism of purpose, praise for the president and corporations for their alleged activities against the epidemic as well as slogans of perseverance. There will be no “second crown wave,” Pence had dyed in June, and even wrote an article with the corresponding title. Now his country faces the third and most violent wave of the epidemic.
The hopes that large sections of the population would be vaccinated soon, even immediately, were also greatly exaggerated. Trump had announced a vaccine months ago “very soon.” His chief of staff, Mark Meadows, said in September that 100 million doses of vaccines would be available in October. In other words: before the presidential elections on November 3.
Trump is playing for time as the virus spirals out of control
The President-designate of the United States, Biden, again asked incumbent Trump to initiate a transfer of government affairs. This would give Biden access to confidential information, such as the planned vaccine distribution, before he takes office.
Of course, Trump’s electoral defeat was also based on his administration’s miserable management of the crisis, ignoring and relativizing deadly dangers. He had compared the virus to the “flu” and announced that it would miraculously disappear if temperatures rose. Now the temperatures are dropping and the number of cases is increasing.
If the supply of the vaccine to 330 million Americans proceeds like the Covid tests in the first months of the epidemic, the United States will once again face chaotic conditions. Because Pfizer’s vaccines need to be doubled, the company expects to supply just 12.5 million Americans this year. Moderna plans to provide 20 million doses of vaccines this year, Johnson & Johnson is talking about 100 million doses by March 2021.
“Shameful and unacceptable”
President-elect Biden made fighting Covid a priority months ago. His team should have access to the plans showing how Americans should be vaccinated, Biden said Monday: “This is a huge, huge company.” If it is not coordinated, “more people could die,” he warned. . If your team had to wait until the inauguration on January 20 to prepare, it would delay all of this by a month or a month and a half.
House Democratic Leader Steny Hoyer declared Wednesday night: “President Trump spends his days playing golf and tweeting angrily about the election results instead of doing his job and monitoring the response of states. United to Covid-19 “. Government health officials should coordinate with Biden’s team. The acting president is said to be “embarrassing and unacceptable.”
Now there is mounting pressure in the ranks of Democrats to quickly adopt additional billions in aid for the unemployed and small business owners. For electoral reasons, the Democrats recently had not wanted to get involved in this. If there is an agreement between the Disabled-Congress and the Disabled-The president comes is open.
By the way, Trump had always complained before the election that fake news outlets always wanted to talk about Covid to hurt him. At his rallies and on Twitter, Trump repeatedly dared to make extremely bold predictions, even by his standards. Then he called: “Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid. By the way, on November 4 you won’t know anything else. ”
with dpa
