The US marked the first day of 2021 by surpassing the dismal beacon of 20 million cases of coronavirus while hospitals, entrepreneurs, vaccine administrators and ordinary families across the country struggled.
More than 10,000 Americans died in the last three days of 2020 when the year ended with the pandemic, which had never been under control in the US since the outbreak began last January, breaking all the wrong world records.
The US has nearly twice as many confirmed cases of coronavirus as the next worst-hit country, India. The South Asian country has 10.2 million cases among a population of 1.3 billion, while the US reached 20 million infections on Friday with a population of 328 million.
Nearly 350,000 Americans have died from Covid-19, according to the coronavirus resource center at Johns Hopkins University, by far the highest death toll in the world. The country with the second most deaths is Brazil, where 195,000 people died of coronavirus.
California, whose second wave of infections is a disease tsunami this fall and winter, has overcrowded morgues in some places and entrepreneurs are turning away grieving families, reports the Los Angeles Times. More than 150 people die every day in Los Angeles alone as deaths increase in December.
Hospitalizations are on the rise in Texas and public health authorities in Harris County, which includes the metropolis of Houston, begged Texas this week to cancel New Year’s Eve celebrations and “cancel all events.”
On January 1, shortly after midnight at the United Memorial Medical Center (UMMC) in Houston, Duc Nguyen sat up in his hospital bed for a video call with his wife.
The glow of a television and a street lamp outside his window provide the only light as a nasal canal delivers oxygen to his lungs.
That was not the way the 33-year-old envisioned the new year, but he said he was grateful UMMC had an empty bed so he could be treated for pneumonia caused by Covid-19.
Nguyen said he was confident he would recover, but he predicted the worst days of the pandemic lay ahead.
“It’s not over yet,” he rasped.
UMMC nurse Tanna Ingraham herself overcame two attacks by Covid-19, which covered health care workers in the country across the country.
In normal times, Ingraham may have rang in the new year and shared drinks with friends.
Instead, she still has the issue of the sudden death this week of a patient who had just been removed from a ventilator amid signs she was recovering.
The patient was 43, the same age as Ingraham, who choked on tears as she pulled the tubes from the patient’s body and placed them in a suitcase – a task she had become accustomed to this year.
The death represents another American for whom the miraculous vaccines now being distributed and randomly administered in the US, because the government fell short of its own targets of vaccinating 20 million citizens by 2020, were too late.
‘I just hope there’s going to be a light at the end of this, because that’s honestly the only thing that keeps me going. That and my faith, ‘Ingraham said, adding:’ So I’m ready for 2021. ‘
David Persse of the Houston Department of Health said the risk of further US spread of the highly contagious new coronavirus variant discovered in Britain was a ‘major concern’.
“We’re all holding on to see if that happens,” he said.
Infections and hospitalizations are on the rise again in New York, especially New York City, the worst hotspot in the world this past spring during the first wave of the pandemic, while vaccinations are behind schedule.
In South Florida, elderly people seeking vaccination jammed telephone lines and crashed into a health department website this week as they tried to make appointments, the Sun-Sentinel reported.
Broward County, around Fort Lauderdale and Boca Raton, said vaccination appointments had already been booked until February.
Florida has recorded 1.3 million cases of coronavirus, with the highest one-day total of the entire pandemic in the state reported Thursday, just over 17,000 new cases.