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Even as the United States recorded more deaths from coronavirus in a single day than before – almost 3,900 – on Wednesday, the crowd’s attack on the U.S. Capitol was revealing some of the same political divisions that made it difficult to fight the pandemic.
The virus is increasing in almost every state, with California being particularly hard hit.
The growing number of deaths and infections in the state is threatening to force hospitals to ration care and essentially decide who lives and who dies.
“People are trying to breathe. People look like they’re drowning when they’re in bed right in front of us, ”said Dr. Jeffrey Chien, an emergency room physician at the Santa Clara Valley Regional Medical Center.
He urged people to do their part to help slow the spread. “I am begging everyone to help us because we are not the front line. We are the bottom line, ”he said.
About 1.9 million people worldwide died of coronavirus, more than 360,000 in the US alone, by far the highest number of deaths on Earth, with also the highest number of cases in the world, over 21 million, according to with the Johns Hopkins coronavirus research center.
December was by far the deadliest month in America so far, and health experts are warning that January could be even more dire because of family reunions and travel over the holidays, while administering coronavirus vaccines approved so far. for emergency use in the USA it has lagged behind federal government goals.
A new, more contagious variant of the virus is spreading across the world and the United States.
Few pro-Trump protesters in Washington on Wednesday were wearing masks, although they had first gathered at a rally that the president addressed outside the White House and then in the halls of Congress after they invaded the Capitol.
Trump has long downplayed the virus and neglected masks, and many of his ardent supporters have followed suit.
“Domestic terrorists invaded the Capitol police, just as the virus was allowed to invade Americans,” said Eric Topol, head of the Scripps Research Translational Institute.
He added: “The United States has lost control of a crowd incited by Trump and a pandemic virus minimized by Trump.”
Some of the forces that contributed to the outbreak of violence on Wednesday were partly predicted by experts in global disease planning when they performed a table exercise in 2019, said Eric Toner, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Safety, who directed the exercise.
“We are considering the possibility of active disinformation and the use of a pandemic for political gains,” said Toner. “Real life turned out to be much worse.”
The outbreak was especially dire in California, which reported the second highest number of coronavirus deaths per day, with 459. The state also recorded more than a quarter of a million new cases weekly.
Only Arizona overcomes California in new cases per resident.
Los Angeles County, the most populous in the country, with 10 million residents, and nearly two dozen other counties, basically ran out of beds for intensive care units.