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The United States marked the first day of 2021 by surpassing the sad threshold of 20 million coronavirus cases, as hospitals, funeral directors, vaccine administrators and ordinary families struggled across the country.
More than 10,000 Americans have died in the last three days of 2020 as the year ended with the pandemic, which has never been under control in the United States since the outbreak began last January, beating all false world records.
The United States has almost twice as many confirmed cases of the coronavirus as the next worst-hit country, India. The South Asian nation has 10.2 million cases out of a population of 1.3 billion, while the United States reached 20 million infections on Friday for a population of 328 million.
Nearly 350,000 Americans have died from Covid-19, according to the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center, by far the highest death toll in the world. The country with the second highest number of deaths is Brazil, where 195,000 people have died from coronavirus.
California, whose second wave of infections this fall and winter turned out to be a tsunami of disease, mortuaries in some places are overflowing and funeral directors are turning away grieving families, the Los Angeles Times reported. More than 150 people die every day in Los Angeles County alone as deaths soared in December.
Hospitalizations are on the rise in Texas, and public health officials in Harris County, which includes metropolitan Houston, have spent the week begging Texans to cancel New Year’s celebrations and “cancel all gatherings.” .
On January 1, shortly after midnight at the United Memorial Medical Center (UMMC) in Houston, Duke Nguyen sat in his hospital bed for a video call with his wife.
The glow of a television and a lamppost outside her window provided the only light as a nasal cannula delivered oxygen to her lungs.
This was not how the 33-year-old had considered welcoming the New Year, but he said he was grateful to UMMC for having a vacant bed so he could be treated for pneumonia caused by Covid-19.
Nguyen said he was convinced he would recover, but predicted the worst days of the pandemic were ahead.
“It’s not over yet,” he growled.
UMMC nurse Tanna Ingraham herself overcame two episodes of Covid-19, which decimated frontline healthcare workers across the country.
Normally Ingraham might have ringed in the New Year by sharing a drink with friends.
Instead, she still came to terms with the sudden death this week of a patient who had just had a ventilator removed amid signs that she was on the mend.
The patient was 43, the same age as Ingraham, who choked back tears by pulling the tubes from the patient’s corpse and placing her in a body bag – a task she has become accustomed to this year.
The death represented another American for whom the miraculous vaccines now hastily distributed and administered randomly in the United States, with the government falling far short of its own goals of vaccinating 20 million citizens by the end of 2020, are arrived too late.
“I just hope that in the end there will be a light because, honestly, that’s the only thing that keeps me going. That and my faith, ”Ingraham said, adding,“ So, 2021, I’m ready. “
David Persse, of the Houston Department of Health, said the risk of the highly infectious novel variant of the novel coronavirus found in Britain spreading in the United States was a “huge concern”.
“We are all getting ready to see if that happens,” he said.
Infections and hospitalizations are on the rise again in New York, particularly in New York, the world’s worst hotspot last spring during the first wave of the pandemic, as vaccinations are overdue.
Elderly people in South Florida seeking vaccinations blocked phone lines and destroyed a state department of health website this week as they tried to make appointments, a reported the Sun-Sentinel.
Broward County, around Fort Lauderdale and Boca Raton, said vaccination appointments were already booked through February.
Florida has recorded 1.3 million cases of the coronavirus, the highest one-day total of the entire pandemic in the state reported Thursday, just over 17,000 new cases.
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