The United States recorded more COVID-19 deaths in one day than ever before – nearly 3,900 – on the day the attack on the Capitol exposed the same deep political divisions that hampered the fight against the pandemic.
The virus is on the rise in several states, with California hitting particularly hard, and on Thursday reported a two-day record total of 1,042 coronavirus deaths. The unfortunate consequences there threaten to force hospitals to take ration care and essentially decide who lives and who dies.
“People gasp for breath. “People look like they are drowning when they are in bed right in front of us,” said Dr. Jeffrey Chien, an emergency physician at Santa Clara Valley Regional Medical Center, said and called on people to slow their 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 shot of the COVID-19 vaccine climbed to at least 5.9 million on Thursday, a one-day gain of about 600,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Hundreds of millions need to be vaccinated to stop the coronavirus.
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 scarier due to family gatherings and travel during the holidays.
A new, more contagious variant spread all over the world and in the US. It remains to be seen what effect 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 despised the virus and scorned masks, and many of his ardent supporters followed his example. He also raged against rallies and protested protesters over restrictions in states like Michigan, where armed supporters stormed the State House last year.
On Wednesday, the day a horde of protesters crossed the U.S. Capitol, efforts to confirm Joe Biden’s election showed 3,865 virus deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University. The numbers can vary dramatically after holidays and weekends, and the figure is subject to revision.
“The domestic terrorists raided the Capitol police, just as the virus was allowed to overwhelm Americans,” said Dr. Eric Topol, head of the Scripps Research Translational Institute. “The US has lost control of a tampered mob and a Trump-deposed pandemic virus.”
Some of the forces contributing to the outbreak of violence were partly predicted 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 Safety, said.
“We have considered the possibility of active disinformation and used a pandemic for political gain,” Toner said. “Real life was much worse.”
In California, health authorities reported 583 new deaths on Thursday, a day after 459 people died. The total death toll there stands at more than 28,000. The state has also registered more than a quarter of a million new weekly businesses, and Arizona alone is in California in cases per capita. Florida broke its record for the highest single-day cases by more than 19,800, while its death toll was 22,400.
Los Angeles County, the most populous country with 10 million inhabitants, and nearly two dozen other counties have in fact run out of COVID-19 intensive care units.
“This is a health crisis of epic proportions,” said Barbara Ferrer, director of public health in Los Angeles County.
Guidelines posted on the Methodist Hospital of Southern California website warn: “If a patient becomes extremely ill and is very unlikely to survive his illness (even with life-saving treatment), certain sources … is to another patient who is more likely to survive. ”
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Associated Press authors Olga Rodriguez in San Francisco and Tamara Lush in Tampa, Florida, contributed to this report.