The United States has crossed the threshold of 150,000 deaths confirmed by Covid-19, just six months after the diagnosis of the first cases in China and with the outbreak far from being under control.
The US death toll is the highest in the world by a significant margin and reached 150,034 on Wednesday, according to the Johns Hopkins University world coronavirus tracker.
More than 4.3 million people have been infected with Covid-19, the disease caused by the new SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. As the summer progresses, the outbreaks have spread across the United States’ solar belt, the region from Florida to southern California, and it seems increasingly likely to spread to the central states. Meanwhile, some early centers of the pandemic, such as New York City, have put the virus under significantly greater control.
The pandemic has rewritten almost every aspect of everyday life in the United States. Economic activity depressed by public health restrictions and virus outbreaks raised the unemployment rate to above 11% in June. Restaurant, museum, and movie theater closings continue to move as states try to reopen, see outbreaks, and again restrict activities.
Schools, once thought to reopen in the fall, are grappling with how to make buildings safe for teachers and students. This week, the country’s second-largest teacher union authorized local strikes as a “last resort” bargaining chip when districts fail to implement coronavirus security measures.
Meanwhile, many of the most fundamental measures to control the virus have remained challenges thanks to an anemic and clumsy federal response, led by the Trump administration.
Widespread outbreaks and week-long delays in test results have undermined contact tracing. Those fundamental flaws have had collateral effects, as the outbreaks have reached nursing homes and continue to fill intensive care units with the most vulnerable, sick and resource-intensive patients.
As the coronavirus spread in March, and without federal leadership, state governors and hospitals began looking for ventilators and personal protective equipment, such as masks, gloves, and gowns for frontline medical workers, which in many places lacked of supplies and that they themselves started dying from Covid-19.
The politics of a pandemic.
Politics has taken a central role in how the pandemic has been addressed. Initially, the president played down the virus and predicted that it would go away; Then, despite the United States becoming the entry point to the global pandemic, it urged companies and now schools to reopen before the sustained decline in cases recommended by federal health experts.
Some mitigation methods, such as the widespread use of facial coatings in public, have been undermined by the President, who recently supported their use.
The president’s controversial rejection of wearing masks and the promotion of dubious treatments for the virus has also publicly turned him against his own health specialists, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has been the nation’s leading infectious disease expert. with six presidents.
Trump has touted the restrictions he imposed on China to travel to the US and then to parts of Europe as evidence that his administration has handled the outbreak well, despite the limited effect those measures have had as the virus it spread.
The increase in infections followed the rush to reopen businesses in many states, without accompanying mandates or even official recommendations to wear face masks and practice social distancing.
States like Florida have kept their economies open despite crowded hospitals, but there are signs that the strategy will not be enough to return the economy to record levels in the days leading up to the pandemic. Last week, for the first time in months, there was an increase in the number of people claiming unemployment benefits.
Public health experts are also concerned about infection levels in states like Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee, and Kentucky, while the surge in Florida, along with Texas, Arizona, and California in June and July, has strained many hospitals.
The coronavirus has had an enormously disproportionate impact on blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans, significantly exacerbated by racial disparities in chronic health conditions, access to affordable and quality doctors and hospitals, and disparities in income, housing, and the risk of exposure in the workplace.
A global push to develop a vaccine is building, and the U.S. has some promising trials underway, even as public health officials anticipate that any plan to equitably distribute a potential vaccine will face setback.
Meanwhile, top federal health officials, like Fauci and the director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Robert Redfield, have warned that the outbreak in the US is Far from being under control, it has a “disturbing” track record and has brought the United States “on its knees.”
All of this has pressured Congress to approve another coronavirus aid package, one that includes school funding, unemployment benefits and hunger relief. But as of now, there is still a chasm between the parties, and Republicans are proposing to cut expanded unemployment aid to $ 200 a week. Meanwhile, with an aid gap, observers predict a wave of evictions could occur.
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