The US recorded more COVID-19 deaths in a single day than ever before – nearly 3,900 – on the same day that the mob’s attack on the Capitol exposed some of the same deep political divisions that have stymied the fight against the pandemic.
The virus is on the rise in several states, with particularly severe blows in California, with a record 1042 deaths from the coronavirus reported in two days on Thursday. Sky-high caseloads threaten to force hospitals to ration and essentially decide who lives and who dies.
People gasp. People look like they are drowning when they lie in bed right in front of us, ”said Dr. Jeffrey Chien, an emergency room physician at Santa Clara Valley Regional Medical Center, urging people to do their bit for slowing the spread. ‘I beg everyone to help us because we are not the front line. We are the last line. “
Meanwhile, the number of Americans who received their first injection of the COVID-19 vaccine has risen to at least 5.9 million Thursday, a one-day gain of about 600,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Hundreds of millions of people will have to be vaccinated to stop the corona virus.
About 1.9 million people around the world have died from the virus, more than 360,000 in the US alone. December was by far the deadliest month yet, and health experts warn that January could be even worse because of family gatherings and holiday travel.
A new, more contagious variant is spreading around the world and in the U.S. It also remains to be seen how the thousands of supporters of President Donald Trump who gathered in Washington this week, many of them without masks, will have on the spread. of the plague.
Trump has long downplayed the virus and scorned masks, and many of his ardent supporters have followed suit. He has also rebelled against lockdowns, calling for protesters to object to restrictions in states such as Michigan, where armed supporters raided the state building last spring.
On Wednesday, the day a horde of protesters breached the Capitol and disrupted efforts to certify Joe Biden’s election, the US recorded 3,865 virus deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University. Figures can fluctuate dramatically after holidays and weekends, and the figure is subject to revision.
“The domestic terrorists have overrun the Capitol Police, just as the virus has been allowed to engulf Americans,” said Dr. Eric Topol, Head of the Scripps Research Translational Institute. “The US lost control of a Trump-instigated mob and Trump-downplayed pandemic virus.”
Some of the forces that contributed to the outbreak of violence were partially envisioned by experts in global disease planning when they held a table exercise in 2019, said Dr. Eric Toner, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security who led the exercise.
“We have considered the possibility of active disinformation and the use of a pandemic for political gain,” said Toner. “Real life turned out to be much worse.”
In California, health authorities reported 583 new deaths on Thursday, a day after 459 people died. The total death toll there is more than 28,000. The state also registered more than a quarter of a million new cases weekly, and only Arizona tops California in per capita cases. Florida broke its record for the highest number of cases in one day with more than 19,800, while the death toll rose to 22,400.
Los Angeles County, the most populous country in the country with a population of 10 million, and nearly two dozen other counties have essentially no beds in the intensive care unit for COVID-19 patients.
“This is a health crisis of epic proportions,” said Barbara Ferrer, director of public health for Los Angeles County.
Guidelines posted on the Methodist Hospital of Southern California website warned, “If a patient becomes extremely ill and is very unlikely to survive their disease (even with life-saving treatment), then certain agents may be … assigned to another patient who is more likely to survive. “
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The Associated Press writers, Olga Rodriguez in San Francisco and Tamara Lush in Tampa, Florida, contributed to this report.