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NEW YORK (AP) – Coronavirus deaths are rising in nearly two-thirds of U.S. states as a winter surge pushes the overall toll to 400,000 as warnings that a highly contagious new variant sets in.
As Americans observed a national holiday on Monday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo pleaded with federal officials to curtail travel from countries where new variants are spreading.
Referring to the new versions detected in Britain, South Africa and Brazil, Cuomo said: “Stop these people from coming here … why do you allow people to fly in this country and then it’s too late? ? “
The US government has already restricted travel from some of the places where the new variants are spreading – such as Britain and Brazil – and recently announced that it will require proof of a negative COVID-19 test for anyone flying in the country.
But the new variant seen in Britain is already spreading in the United States, and the Centers for Disease Control and Protection have warned that it will likely become the dominant version in the country by March. The CDC said the variant was about 50% more contagious than the virus that causes the bulk of cases in the United States.
While the variant doesn’t cause more serious illness, it can lead to more hospitalizations and deaths just because it spreads more easily. In Britain, it worsened a serious epidemic that flooded hospitals and was blamed for sudden jumps in cases in some other European countries.
As it stands, many American states are already under enormous strain. The seven-day moving average of daily deaths is increasing in 30 states and the District of Columbia, and on Monday the death toll in the United States topped 398,000, according to data collected by Johns Hopkins University – by far the number highest death toll of any country in the world.
One of the hardest states in the recent surge is Arizona, where the moving average has risen over the past two weeks from about 90 deaths per day to about 160 per day on January 17.
Rural Yuma County – known as the Winter Lettuce Capital of the United States – is now one of the state’s hotspots. Exhausted nurses routinely send COVID-19 patients on a long helicopter ride to hospitals in Phoenix when they don’t have enough staff. The county has fallen behind on coronavirus testing in heavily Hispanic neighborhoods and just ran out of vaccines.
But some support is coming from nursing nurses and a new wave of free testing for farm workers and the elderly in Yuma County.
In the midst of the outbreak, a massive effort is underway to get Americans vaccinated, but the campaign starts off unevenly. According to the latest federal data, about 31.2 million doses of the vaccine have been distributed, but only about 10.6 million people have received at least one dose.
In California, the most populous state, counties are pushing for more vaccines as the state tries to reduce a high rate of infection that has led to record hospitalizations and deaths.
Although the state said last week that anyone aged 65 and over can start getting the vaccine, Los Angeles County and others have said they don’t have enough to vaccinate so many. people. They focus first on protecting the most vulnerable healthcare workers and elderly people in nursing homes.
On Monday, the principal of the Los Angeles Unified School District sent a letter requesting state and county permission to provide school vaccinations for staff, members of the local community – and for students once they quit. A vaccine for children has been approved.
The COVID-19 death rate in Los Angeles County – an epicenter of the US pandemic – is about one person every six minutes. The South Coast Air Quality Management District on Sunday suspended certain pollution control limits on the number of cremations for at least 10 days in an effort to deal with a backlog of bodies in hospitals and funeral homes.
In other parts of the country, authorities are working to make sure people take the vaccine once offered to do so, fearing that many people are reluctant to take it. Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, at a live-streaming event on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, received a photo and urged other Marylanders to follow suit.
“We’re all looking forward to the day when we can take off and throw off our masks … when we can go out for a big party at our favorite crowded restaurant or bar with all of our family and friends,” Hogan said. “The only way for us to get back to a sense of normalcy is to use these COVID-19 vaccines.”
In New York City, Cuomo said the state, which has recorded more than 41,000 deaths, is “in a race” between vaccination rate and infection rate. He said federal authorities need to improve their efforts to rapidly distribute vaccine doses.
Similar challenges are surfacing around the world.
The head of the World Health Organization on Monday blasted drugmaker profits and vaccine inequalities, saying it is “not fair” for younger, healthier adults in some countries wealthy get vaccinated against COVID-19 before the elderly or healthcare workers in poorer countries.
Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus began the WHO Executive Board meeting by lamenting that a poor country received only 25 doses of vaccine while over 39 million doses were administered in nearly 50 countries over rich.
“Only 25 doses have been administered in a country with the lowest income – not 25 million, not 25,000 – only 25. I have to be frank: the world is on the brink of catastrophic moral failure,” Tedros said. He did not specify the country, but a WHO spokesperson identified him as Guinea.
Tedros nevertheless hailed the scientific achievement behind the deployment of coronavirus vaccines less than a year after the outbreak of the pandemic in China.
“Vaccines are the bullet in the arm that we all need, literally and figuratively,” Tedros said. “But we now face the real danger that while vaccines may bring hope to some, they become another brick in the wall of inequality between the worlds of the haves and have-nots.
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