The United States marked the first day of 2021 by overcoming the sad milestone of 20 million cases of coronavirus, while hospitals, undertakers, vaccine administrators and ordinary families struggled across the country.
More than 10,000 Americans died in the last three days of 2020, when the year ended the pandemic, which has never been under control in the United States since the outbreak began last January, breaking all the wrong world records.
The United States has almost twice as many confirmed cases of coronavirus than the next hardest hit country, India. The South Asian country has 10.2 million cases out of a population of 1.3 billion, while the United States reached 20 million infections on Friday with a population of 328 million.
Nearly 350,000 Americans died from Covid-19, according to the Johns Hopkins University coronavirus resource center, by far the highest death toll in the world. The second country with the most fatalities is Brazil, where 195,000 people died of coronavirus.
California, whose second wave of infections this fall and winter proved to be a tsunami of disease, morgues in some places are overflowing and morticians are rejecting bereaved families, the Los Angeles Times reported. More than 150 people die every day in Los Angeles County alone, with deaths increasing in December.
Hospitalizations are increasing in Texas and public health officials in Harris County, which includes the metropolis of Houston, spent the week begging Texans to cancel New Year’s celebrations and “cancel all meetings.”
On January 1, shortly after midnight at the United Memorial Medical Center (UMMC) in Houston, Duc Nguyen sat on his hospital bed for a video call with his wife.
The brightness of a television and a lamp post outside its window provided the only light, since a nasal cannula supplied oxygen to his lungs.
It was not how the 33-year-old man had imagined a welcome in the new year, but he said he was thankful that UMMC had a spare bed so he could be treated for pneumonia caused by Covid-19.
Nguyen said he was confident he would recover, but predicted that the worst days of the pandemic were ahead.
“It’s not over yet,” he murmured.
UMMC nurse Tanna Ingraham overcame two Covid-19 crises herself, which decimated frontline health professionals across the country.
In normal times, Ingraham could have played the New Year by sharing drinks with friends.
Instead, she was still dealing with the sudden death this week of a patient who had just been removed from a respirator amid signs that she was recovering.
The patient was 43 years old, the same age as Ingraham, who smothered tears by taking the tubes from the patient’s corpse and putting her in a corpse bag – a task she got used to this year.
Death represented yet another American for whom miracle vaccines are now being hastily distributed and randomly administered in the U.S., as the government fell far short of its own goals to vaccinate 20 million citizens by the end of 2020, it was too late.
“I only hope that at the end of this there will be a light because, honestly, it is the only thing that keeps me going. That and my faith, ”said Ingraham, adding:“ So, 2021, I’m ready. “
David Persse, of the Houston health department, said the risk of a new spread in the United States of the new highly infectious coronavirus variant discovered in Britain was a “major concern”.
“We are all getting ready to see if that happens,” he said.
Infections and hospitalizations are increasing again in New York, especially in New York City, the worst tipping point in the world last spring during the first wave of the pandemic, while vaccinations are delayed.
In South Florida, seniors seeking vaccines jammed phone lines and hacked into the state health department’s website this week as they tried to make appointments, Sun-Sentinel reported.
Broward County, near Fort Lauderdale and Boca Raton, said vaccination appointments had been scheduled until February.
Florida recorded 1.3 million cases of coronavirus, with the highest pandemic total in a day in the state reported on Thursday, just over 17,000 new cases.