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NEW YORK: Pandemic-weary Americans entered the Christmas season on Friday (Nov. 27) under heavy pressure from political leaders and health officials to stay home, avoid most gatherings, and cut back on holiday shopping as coronavirus surged across the country.
A day after the nation celebrated a quiet Thanksgiving Day, malls and retailers enforcing strict COVID-19 rules saw fewer Americans in stores for the traditional Black Friday start of the holiday shopping season.
“Remember, avoid the crowds and shop from home this Black Friday,” Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat in his first term, wrote on Twitter, a sentiment echoed by many state and local officials.
COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations have skyrocketed in recent weeks, prompting increasingly aggressive clampdowns in many U.S. states as the country awaits government approval of vaccines developed by drug makers. Pfizer and Moderna.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will take a formal step early next week to decide who receives the first round of the vaccine once approved, with an advisory committee meeting and vote on the “allocation of initial supplies of the COVID-19 vaccine “. on Tuesday, according to an agenda posted on its website.
Roughly 90,000 patients were being treated for COVID-19 in hospitals on Friday, a number that has doubled in the past month amid rising infections and is the highest since the pandemic began.
THE SUPREME COURT STRIKES CUOMO
On Wednesday night, the US Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional an order by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, which imposed severe limits on the number of people who could worship in churches and synagogues across the state.
Cuomo dismissed the ruling as “irrelevant” and said it referred to specific areas that were no longer considered high risk. But it could lead to legal challenges against similar rules posted in places of worship in other US states.
“It is fair to say that this Supreme Court decision has broader implications and that governors should be guided by it in any attempt to distinguish houses of worship for unequal treatment,” said Randy Mastro, lead attorney for the Catholic Archdiocese of Brooklyn. the case, he told Reuters.
Washington, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser said this week that her latest COVID-19 restrictions on gatherings also applied to indoor church services, reducing the capacity from 100 people to 50.
Some medical centers and intensive care units are already exceeding capacity.
“This is the reality we face when COVID-19 is allowed to spread uncontrollably: ICU at full capacity, not enough health workers available,” New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham said in a tweet.
Grisham, a Democrat, did not say who she believed had let the virus spread uncontrollably. The governor has imposed a lockdown requiring all “non-essential” businesses to close and residents to stay home.
880 people were hospitalized with COVID-19 on Friday in New Mexico. A hospital in rural Curry County was the last to reach capacity in its intensive care unit earlier this week, according to the county’s Facebook page.
Some politicians and health experts have said that Americans traveling for the Thanksgiving holiday could spread the contagion even faster and push the already strained healthcare system into the abyss.
Many Americans followed the advice to stay home for Thanksgiving on Thursday. Others chose to travel, saying they were willing to risk getting sick to see family members.
The day before Thanksgiving, usually one of the busiest travel days of the year in the United States, more than 1.07 million people transited through U.S. airports, the most of any day since start of the pandemic, according to the Transportation Security Administration. .
Nearly 6 million Americans traveled by air from Friday to Wednesday, he said, a number that, however, is less than half the number in the same period last year.
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