NEW YORK (Reuters) – More Americans were hospitalized with COVID-19 on Wednesday than at any time since the start of the pandemic, with total coronavirus infections exceeding the 21 million mark, deaths soared in much of the United States and a historic vaccination effort has waned.
COVID-19 hospitalizations in the U.S. reached a record 130,834 on Tuesday night, according to a Reuters count of public health data, while 3,684 reported deaths were the second highest number of deaths in a pandemic day.
That terrible number means that on Tuesday someone died of COVID-19 every 24 seconds in the United States. With total deaths exceeding 357,000, one in 914 U.S. residents has died of COVID-19 since the pandemic began, according to a Reuters analysis.
In hard-hit California, public health officials have ordered hospitals in more than a dozen counties in the south and center filled with COVID-19 patients to suspend elective surgery for at least three weeks.
The order, issued on Tuesday by the state Department of Public Health, applies to 14 counties, including Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego counties, where the hospital’s critical care capacity has been severely affected.
The total number of COVID-19 cases in the U.S. surpassed the 21 million mark on Wednesday, and with many health systems approaching a breaking point, pressure has increased on state and local authorities to accelerate the distribution of the two. vaccines authorized by Pfizer Inc with partner BioNTech SE and Moderna Inc.
The lack of a federal plan for the crucial final step of putting vaccines in tens of millions of weapons has left state and local authorities responsible for the monumental effort, creating a patchwork of different plans in the United States.
MEGA VACCINE HUBS AND THE NATIONAL GUARD
Some states have called in extra resources to speed up vaccine administration. North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper mobilized the state National Guard on Tuesday to “provide support to local health professionals” to more quickly distribute coronavirus vaccines.
“We will use all the necessary resources and personnel,” Cooper said in a statement.
Maryland Governor Larry Hogan also announced that the state National Guard’s emergency support teams will assist local health departments in their vaccination efforts.
“At the current rate of allocation,” said Hogan, the state hopes to start vaccinating priority group 1b – people aged 75 and over and essential frontline workers – by the end of January.
In New York City, where Mayor Bill de Blasio and Governor Andrew Cuomo fought over the slow administration of the vaccine, officials said on Wednesday that the city was expanding its “vaccination centers”, which would include 15 sites in January 16, five “mega sites” among them. The sites will be able to vaccinate 100,000 New Yorkers a week, the official said.
The ambitious goal comes when the city manages about 10,000 kicks on Tuesday, according to data published on Wednesday.
De Blasio also told a news conference that home health workers and some members of the New York Police Department could receive the vaccine for the first time on Wednesday.
After blaming local authorities earlier this week for the slow rate of vaccinations in some New York hospitals, Cuomo said on Wednesday that the rate among hospital staff across the state has tripled to 30,000 vaccinations a day since Monday .
In Florida, which set a new record for coronavirus cases in a single day, Ron DeSantis announced that the Hard Rock stadium in the Miami metropolitan area was converting its test operations into a vaccination center.
Another 3 million doses of the two vaccines were sent to U.S. states on Tuesday, acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller said in a statement, bringing the total to more than 19 million doses in 21 days, of which only a fraction has been administered so far.
Both authorized vaccines require two doses three or four weeks apart. Health workers in several states this week began receiving their second dose of the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine, which was approved before the Modern injection.
The US government was considering halving doses of Moderna’s vaccine to free up the supply of more vaccines. But scientists at Moderna and the National Institutes of Health said it could take two months to study whether halved doses would be effective.
Meanwhile, CVS Health Corp said on Wednesday that it hopes to complete the administration of the first doses of COVID-19 vaccines in nearly 8,000 nursing homes in the U.S. by January 25.
A massive global vaccination campaign will be needed to establish a level of collective immunity that could end the devastating pandemic that is plaguing much of the United States and many other countries, with the emergence of more transmissible variants of the virus.
A variant that swept the UK has been reported in at least five U.S. states, said the director of the National Institute of Health, Francis Collins, in an interview with the Washington Post on Wednesday.
“Now we have seen the same UK virus in the US in at least five states and I would be surprised if it didn’t grow very quickly,” said Collins, adding, however, that it doesn’t seem to be more serious.
Reporting by Maria Caspani, Peter Szekely in New York and Gabriella Borter in Fairfield, Connecticut, Dan Whitcomb and Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Additional reporting by Anurag Maan in Bengaluru, Lisa Shumaker in Chicago and Brad Brooks in Lubbock, Texas; Writing by Maria Caspani; Editing by Bill Berkrot and Jonathan Oatis