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WASHINGTON: The United States surpassed nine million reported coronavirus cases on Friday, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University, as infections spike days before the nation elects its next president.
With the virus spreading more rampant in the Midwest and South, hospitals are also filling up again, stretching the health care system just as the nation approaches flu season.
“We are not prepared for this wave,” Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, warned on ABC’s Good Morning America on Thursday.
Authorities in El Paso, Texas, imposed a curfew this week to protect “overwhelmed” healthcare workers and began setting up field hospitals.
But a judge’s attempt to shut down nonessential businesses in the city has been challenged by the mayor and the state attorney general, the Washington Post reported.
The Midwestern state of Wisconsin has also established a field hospital in recent weeks, and hospital workers in Missouri were ringing warning bells as cases surge.
Hospitals in the western state of Utah were preparing to ration care next week when patients flooded their ICUs, according to local media.
Totally disqualifying
The United States, which has seen a resurgence of its Covid-19 outbreak since mid-October, has recorded 9,007,298 cases, according to a real-time tally by the Baltimore-based school.
On Thursday, the country set a record for new daily infections of more than 91,000 in 24 hours.
The pattern of the pandemic so far shows that hospitalizations generally begin to increase several weeks after infections and deaths a few weeks later.
More than 229,000 people have died from the virus in the U.S. Since the pandemic began, Hopkins’ tally as of Friday afternoon showed, and the daily death toll has risen steadily in recent weeks. also, although it currently remains below the maximum levels.
For months, public health officials have been warning of a spike in cases as colder fall weather sets in in the US, driving more people indoors.
As the weather changes, New York and other parts of the Northeast, which were the epicenter of the outbreak in the United States in the spring but largely controlled the virus during the summer, reported a worrying increase.
Some epidemiologists believe that Covid-19 spreads more easily in drier, colder air.
Rural areas, which appeared to be coming off slightly in the spring compared to crowded cities, also faced spikes with states like North Dakota seeing one of the steepest increases in recent weeks.
The state is so overwhelmed that earlier this month it told residents that they had to do their own contact tracing, local media reported.
Four days before the election, Donald Trump was struggling to hold on to the White House against challenger Joe Biden, who has criticized the president’s virus response.
“It is as severe an indictment of a president’s record as one can imagine, and it is completely disqualifying,” Biden said Friday when the figure topped nine million.
Trump downplays the virus even as the death toll has accelerated once again, with a large number of demonstrations with little social distancing or wearing of masks.
He has repeatedly told his supporters that the country is “rounding the curve” in Covid infections.
But Americans, wary of crowded voting booths on Election Day as the virus spreads, are voting early in record numbers.
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