Covid 19 coronavirus: death toll nears 300,000 in the United States as vaccine launch begins

The United States is just days away from authorizing its first coronavirus vaccine for emergency use, but the nation’s path to herd immunity against the deadly disease will not be easy.

President-elect Joe Biden vowed this week to vaccinate 100 million Americans in his first 100 days in the White House.

The United States expects to vaccinate 20 million people this month, with residents of long-term care facilities and healthcare workers at the front of the line.

However, Biden warned that coronavirus vaccination efforts in the United States “will slow down and stop” if Congress does not provide funding urgently.

He stressed that it was imperative that politicians “finish the bipartisan work underway now or millions of Americans can wait months more to get the vaccine.”

America’s faltering efforts to quell the pandemic have been widely criticized: The nation is the worst affected in the world, with more than 15 million cases and a death toll approaching 300,000 every day.

The United States is now losing more than 3,000 people a day to the coronavirus with the nation’s hospitals and support services on edge.

“I think we have passed the breaking point,” Dr. Adolphe Edward, executive director of El Centro Regional Medical Center in Southern California, told CNN earlier this week.

“The staff are here, but they are broken.

“Resilience begins to fail at some point, regardless of how much you know this team is willing to do.”

Dr. Edward said the hospital had two beds left in intensive care, after that patients would be cared for in an pop-up field hospital, built in the parking lot.

“He really could be back in a war zone,” he said, comparing the field hospital to the time he spent serving in the US military in the Middle East.

“We are at war against Covid.”

US health officials warned of a spike after millions of Americans traveled to celebrate Thanksgiving despite pleas from authorities to stay home.

States continue to order their own closures, yet cases and deaths continue to rise.

California ordered the closure of most offices and prohibited meetings between different households. Bars and services such as hair salons were closed and restaurants were allowed to serve only takeout.

Non-essential travel was also temporarily restricted statewide, as California experienced record new cases of Covid-19.

The shutdown came as California Governor Gavin Newsom warned that the state’s hospital system was at risk of being “overwhelmed.”

The US Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday that trial data for the drug Pfizer-BioNTech did not reveal “specific safety concerns,” opening the way for the organization to authorize it for emergency use.

But health officials are struggling to get Americans to take other public health measures.

“This is not just the worst public health event. This is the worst event this country will face,” White House coronavirus task force coordinator Deborah Birx told NBC’s Meet the Press.

“The vaccine is essential, but it is not going to save us from this current increase.”

Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb predicted that the death toll in the United States, now more than 280,000, could reach 400,000 by the end of January.

“We have a bleak future ahead of us for the next six weeks,” he told CBS’s Face the Nation.

“People really need to protect themselves.”

And in a disturbing turn of events, several recent polls indicate that many Americans are still unsure whether they will choose to be vaccinated, while others have steadfastly refused to receive the vaccine.

A recent survey by AP-NORC asked 1,117 American adults if they planned to get vaccinated when a Covid-19 vaccine becomes available.

The results, released Wednesday, show that only 47 percent of those surveyed said they would get vaccinated against the virus.

Of the other respondents, 26 percent said they would not get the vaccine and 27 percent said they were not sure.

With many experts saying that roughly 70 percent of the population would need to be vaccinated against the virus to achieve herd immunity, that last category of indecisive people becomes crucial.

The general launch of the vaccine is expected in the US around February, and high-risk hospital residents, staff and workers are likely to be vaccinated before the end of this year as a priority. .

The virus has killed more than 1.5 million people worldwide since the outbreak in China emerged last December, according to an AFP tally from official sources.

– With wires