USA with more daily deaths than tragic 9/11

When the United States looks set to launch an anti-covid-19 vaccine, the numbers have become even more bleak, with more than 3,000 deaths in a single day, higher than “D-Day” or “9/11”.

According to the American news agency AP, there were one million new cases in the span of five days, placing more than 106,000 people in hospitals.

The crisis in the United States is leading medical centers into a disrupted situation, leaving public health workers and professionals exhausted and tormented, between crying and nightmare.

In all, the crisis caused more than 290 thousand dead across the country, which had more than 15.5 million confirmed infections.

The United States 3,124 deaths on Wednesday, the highest daily total since the start of the pandemic, according to Johns Hopkins University.

Until last week, the peak had been 2,603 ​​deaths on April 15, when New York City was the epicenter of the outbreak in the country.

The death toll on Wednesday eclipsed the death toll of Americans on “D-Day” from the Normandy invasion during World War II: 2,500, among some 4,400 dead allies. It also exceeded the number of victims on September 11, 2001: 2,977.

New daily cases are on the rise, with more than 209,000 on average. And the number of people in the hospital with covid-19 breaks records almost every day.

An advisory panel from the US Administration endorsed on Thursday the widespread use of Pfizer’s covid-19 vaccine to help beat the pandemic.

Depending on how quickly the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of the panel’s recommendation, vaccines may begin to be administered within a few days, ushering in the largest vaccination campaign in the history of the United States.

Reports of chaos

In Saint Louis, respiratory therapist Joe Kowalczyk reported that he saw entire floors of his hospital being filled with covid-19 patients, some with two patients per room. He added that the supply of ventilators is declining and resources are so limited that colleagues on a shift had to ventilate a patient using a “BiPAP” machine, similar to the devices used to treat sleep apnea.

He also confessed that when he goes home, to sleep during the day, at the end of tiring shifts at night, he sometimes has nightmares.

In South Dakota, physician Clay Smith treated hundreds of patients with covid-19 while working at “Monument Health Spearfish Hospital” and “Sheridan Memorial Hospital” in neighboring Wyoming.

He described that patients were trapped in the emergency room for hours while waiting for beds on the main floor or transfers to larger hospitals. Transfers are becoming more difficult and complicated, with some patients being sent to Denver, 600 kilometers away.

“This is a huge burden for families and emergency systems because when someone uses an ambulance and sends a patient to a location 600 kilometers away, that ambulance is out of the community for basically a whole day,” he noted.

Smith said that some patients stopped thinking that the coronavirus was “a scam” and later said: “Wow, it’s real and I feel terrible”. But he also noted situations of people with covid-19 who “remained skeptical” about the existence of the disease.

“It is difficult to observe that,” he said, stressing that, at the end of the day, “the virus does not care whether someone believes in it or not”.

New Orleans health director Jennifer Avegno told the AP of a recent visit to a hospital, where she observed doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists and other professionals exposing themselves to the disease in a long and useless attempt to save a dying patient with a covid. -19. “Some started to cry afterwards,” he confided.

In Virginia, Governor Ralph Northam, a training doctor, ordered a curfew at midnight and expanded the mask rules to require that they be worn by the population outdoors and not just indoors.

Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf temporarily suspended school sports and other extra-curricular activities, ordered gyms, theaters and casinos to close and banned meals in restaurants.

In Idaho, Governor Brad Little did not impose a statewide mandatory mask or enact additional restrictions, despite the public health agency announcing that covid-19 is now the leading cause of death in that state.

The Republican governor warned that if hospitals continue to fill and the state has to start “crisis patterns of care” life-saving treatment would be reserved for patients “most likely to survive”.

Little was one of the first governors to wear a mask publicly in the spring and encouraged others to do so, but anti-mask sentiment is intense in that conservative US state (Idaho).

In New York City, which was devastated by the virus in the spring, a doctor expressed relative optimism, justifying that doctors are now better able to control the virus than at the beginning of the pandemic.

“At the beginning of spring we didn’t know enough,” admitted Jolion McGreevy, who heads Mount Sinai Hospital’s emergency department, concluding: “Now, we are operating from a knowledge phase that translates into a big leap over spring “.

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