Covid 19 coronavirus: US on its knees as cases rise in every state

The United States is at a breaking point, as the country reports more than a million coronavirus cases in the last week.

It is an unimaginable figure and an indictment for the lack of strategy of the administration of US President Donald Trump, which has failed to get states to take a united approach to tackling the deadly virus.

The number of cases in the US is increasing at a higher rate than at any other point in the pandemic, and the New York Times describes the different responses from each state as a “crazy virus response.” Last week, all 50 states in the country reported an increase in the number of cases.

The nation’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said Wednesday that the country needed a “uniform approach” to combat the coronavirus, rather than a “disjointed” response.

However, hopes that Trump will unify the states in his final months in office are slim.

Fauci told CNN’s Jake Tapper this week that the president has not attended a meeting with his own coronavirus task force in “several months.”

Fauci said Vice President Mike Pence continues to attend meetings and is relaying information to the president.

Across the country, officials are warning that testing labs are reaching full capacity, and one lab manager likened the situation to “moving chairs on the Titanic.”

Meanwhile, Dr. Scott Atlas, a controversial member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, faces criticism after he told the people of Michigan to “stand up” against the new coronavirus restrictions.

Atlas made the comments after Gov. Gretchen Whitmer announced a series of new restrictions to combat a surge in coronavirus cases.

Shortly after Whitmer’s press conference, Atlas, Trump’s top adviser on coronavirus, tweeted: “The only way this stops is if people get up. You get what you accept.”

“It’s incredibly reckless, considering everything that has happened, everything that is happening,” Whitmer said Tuesday.

In October, authorities arrested 14 men who had allegedly conspired to kidnap Whitmer and put her on “trial”, accusing her of being a “tyrant” for her measures to control the coronavirus.

Atlas later retracted his comments, saying he “never talked about violence at all,” but did not delete the original tweet.

In the state of Texas alone, more than 1.11 million cases of the virus have been reported, and it was the first state in the US to reach one million cases.

In El Paso, in the far west of the state, inmates have been recruited to help deal with a body overflow. The nine inmates are temporarily working at the hospital to assist exhausted hospital workers at the El Paso County Medical Examiner’s Office, according to authorities. Inmates are assisting staff where there are more than 100 bodies housed in permanent and mobile morgues.

“We are short on staff,” El Paso County Judge Ricardo Samaniego told KVIA.

“People are really tired; nurses and doctors are tired.”

The outlet reported that inmates were paid $ 2 an hour to help transport the bodies. They were provided with personal protective equipment for their eight-hour shifts.

In the same city, a nurse described a “dire” situation at a local hospital, saying that dying patients were subjected to emergency resuscitation and that they “just came out in a body bag.”

In a live Facebook video, El Paso University Medical Center nurse Lawanna Rivers described a “well” that doctors avoided entering for fear of infection.

“My first day of orientation, they told me that any patient that goes into the well, they only come out in a body bag,” Rivers said.

Rivers said in the nearly hour-long video that patients were being put into the “well” and that medical staff were ordered to try to resuscitate them only three times, before letting the patient die.

“Of all the Covid assignments I’ve been on, this one here has really left me emotionally scarred,” said the travel nurse. “The facility I’m in has outgrown the one I had in New York.”

In a statement to KFOX 14, the hospital acknowledged the “difficult physical and emotional cost” that the pandemic had had on healthcare workers, but said it “cannot fully verify the events expressed” in the video.

In Los Angeles, California, a sports stadium that has been transformed into a coronavirus testing site is now testing tens of thousands of residents every day.

Last week, Eric Garcetti, the mayor of Los Angeles, announced that testing capacity in the city would expand to more than 30,000 per day as the city faced a further increase in cases.

“This is one of the most precarious, dangerous and fragile moments in our fight against Covid-19,” Garcetti said.

This week, the photos showed long lines of people waiting for tests.

A new report also found that as cases increased across the country, demand for testing was beginning to outstrip the ability of testing companies to supply consumers.

“We are still far behind what we need with testing. And as these cases skyrocket, the need for testing is far exceeding what we have,” said Heather Price, senior director of science policy and regulatory advisor at the Association of American Medical Colleges, told NPR.

While a shortage of tests was a global problem in the coronavirus pandemic outbreak, in the U.S. testing is now widely available in doctors’ offices, fire stations, walkways and grocery stores, according to the report. .

But experts say that despite the federal government’s efforts, the current level is below what is needed to deal with the current crisis, and testing levels are not yet available everywhere in the US.

Melissa Miller, who runs a testing lab at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, said she feels like “we’re moving chairs on the Titanic.”

“We are trying to, you know, move things around to make it work and put everything in order.

“But we are in this great ship that is sinking.”