NEW YORK (Reuters) – More Americans have been hospitalized with COVID-19 on Wednesday than ever since the pandemic began as the total number of coronavirus infections exceeded 21 million, the number of deaths in much of the United States boomed and a historic vaccination effort lagged.
According to a Reuters census of public health data, U.S. COVID-19 hospital admissions hit a record 130,834 Tuesday, while 3,684 reported fatalities were the pandemic’s second-highest one-day death toll.
That horrendous toll meant that every 24 seconds in the United States, someone died from COVID-19 every 24 seconds on Tuesday. With a total death toll of more than 357,000, one in 914 US residents has died from COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic, according to a Reuters analysis.
In hard-hit California, public health authorities have ordered hospitals in more than a dozen southern and central counties, overwhelmed by COVID-19 patients, to suspend elective surgery for at least three weeks.
The order, issued late Tuesday by the state’s Department of Health, applies to 14 counties, including Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego counties, where hospital intensive care capacity has been severely depleted.
The total number of COVID-19 cases in the US crossed the 21 million mark on Wednesday and, as many healthcare systems approached breaking point, pressure was put on state and local officials to partner with the distribution of Pfizer Inc’s two authorized vaccines. BioNTech SE and Moderna. Inc.
In the absence of a federal blueprint for the crucial final step of getting the vaccines into tens of millions of weapons, state and local officials are in charge of the monumental effort, creating a patchwork of different plans in the United States.
VACCINE MEGA HUBS AND THE NATIONAL GUARD
Some states have enlisted additional resources to speed up vaccine delivery. North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper mobilized the state National Guard on Tuesday to “provide support to local health care providers” to speed up the spread of coronavirus vaccines.
“We will use all necessary resources and personnel,” Cooper said in a statement.
Maryland Governor Larry Hogan also announced that emergency support teams from the state National Guard will lend a hand to local health departments in their vaccination efforts.
“At the current pace of allocation,” Hogan said, the state expects to be able to begin vaccinating the 1b priority group – people 75 and older and key frontline workers by the end of January.
In New York City, where Mayor Bill de Blasio and Governor Andrew Cuomo spar over sluggish vaccine administration, officials said on Wednesday that the city was ramping up its ‘vaccine hubs,’ which would include 15 sites on Jan. 16, five ‘mega sites’ among them. The sites will have the capacity to vaccinate 100,000 New Yorkers per week, the official said.
The ambitious goal comes because the city took down about 10,000 shots on Tuesday, according to data posted Wednesday.
De Blasio also said in a newsletter that home care workers and some members of the New York police force could get the vaccine for the first time on Wednesday.
After blaming local officials earlier this week for the slow rate of vaccination in some New York hospitals, Cuomo said on Wednesday that the rate among hospital staff statewide has tripled to 30,000 vaccinations a day since Monday.
In Florida, which set a new one-day record of coronavirus cases, Ron DeSantis announced that the Hard Rock stadium in the Miami metropolitan area would convert its testing operations into a vaccination center.
Another 3 million doses of the two vaccines were sent to the U.S. states on Tuesday, acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller said in a statement, bringing the total to more than 19 million doses in 21 days, only a fraction of which is to date. administered. .
Both approved vaccines require two doses three or four weeks apart. Health professionals in several states began receiving their second dose of the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine this week, which had been approved before the Moderna injection.
The U.S. government was considering halving the Moderna’s vaccine doses to release more vaccinations. But scientists at Moderna and the National Institutes of Health said it could take two months to investigate whether the halved doses would be effective.
Meanwhile, CVS Health Corp said Wednesday it expected to complete delivery of the first doses of COVID-19 vaccines to nearly 8,000 nursing homes in the US by Jan. 25.
A massive global vaccination campaign will be needed to achieve a level of herd immunity that could end the devastating pandemic raging across much of the United States and many other countries, with more highly communicable variants of the virus emerge.
A variant swept across the UK has been reported in at least five US states, National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins said in an interview with the Washington Post on Wednesday.
“We’ve now seen that same British virus in the US in at least five states, and I would be surprised if it doesn’t grow that fast,” Collins said, adding that it doesn’t appear to be more serious. .
Reporting by Maria Caspani, Peter Szekely in New York and Gabriella Borter in Fairfield, Connecticut, Dan Whitcomb and Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Additional reporting by Anurag Maan in Bengaluru, Lisa Shumaker in Chicago, and Brad Brooks in Lubbock, Texas; Written by Maria Caspani; Edited by Bill Berkrot and Jonathan Oatis