NEW YORK (Reuters) -More Americans were hospitalized on Wednesday with COVID-19 than at any time since the pandemic began, as total coronavirus infections exceeded 21 million, deaths shot up in much of the world. United States and there was a historic vaccination effort.
U.S. hospitalizations for COVID-19 hit a record 130,834 on Tuesday afternoon, according to a Reuters public health data count, while 3,684 deaths were the second highest number of pandemic deaths in a single day. day.
This terrible toll meant that on Tuesday someone died of COVID-19 every 24 seconds in the United States. With a total of more than 357,000 deaths, one in 914 U.S. residents has died from COVID-19 since the pandemic began, according to a Reuters analysis.
In California, public health authorities ordered hospitals in more than a dozen southern and central counties overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients to suspend elective surgeries for at least three weeks.
The order, issued Tuesday afternoon 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 is ‘has spread severely.
The total number of U.S. COVID-19 cases exceeded 21 million on Monday and, with many health systems approaching the breaking point, pressure increased on state and local officials to speed up the distribution of the two vaccines. authorized by Pfizer Inc. with partners BioNTech SE and Moderna Inc.
The lack of a federal plan for the crucial final step of getting vaccines in tens of millions of guns has left state and local officials responsible for the monumental effort, creating a mosaic of different plans in the United States.
VACCINE MEGA HUBS AND THE NATIONAL GUARD
Some states have called for additional resources to speed up vaccine administrations. North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper on Tuesday mobilized the state National Guard to “support local health care providers” to more quickly distribute coronavirus vaccines.
“We will use all necessary resources and personnel,” Cooper said in a statement.
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan also announced that State National Guard emergency support teams will lend a hand to local health departments in their vaccination efforts.
“At the current rate of allocation,” Hogan said, the state hopes to be able to start vaccinating priority group 1b (people 75 and older and essential front-line workers) by the end of January.
In New York City, where Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo have fought for slow vaccine administration, officials said Wednesday the city was increasing its “vaccination centers,” which would include 15 locations on January 16, five “mega sites” among them.The sites will have the capacity to vaccinate 100,000 New Yorkers a week, the official said.
The ambitious target comes when the city administered about 10,000 shots on Tuesday, according to data released Wednesday.
De Blasio also said in a news release that domestic health aides and some members of the New York City police department could receive the vaccine for the first time Wednesday.
After starting to blame local officials this week for the slow pace of vaccinations at some New York hospitals, Cuomo said Wednesday that the statewide hospital staff rate has tripled to 30,000 inoculations a day since of Monday.
In Florida, which set a new one-day record for coronavirus cases, Ron DeSantis announced that the Hard Rock Stadium in the Miami metropolitan area was turning its testing operations into a vaccination center.
Another 3 million doses of the two vaccines were sent to U.S. states on Tuesday, Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller said in a statement, bringing the total to more than 19 million doses in 21 days, only a fraction of which has been administered so far.
The two authorized vaccines require two doses of three or four weeks apart. This week, health workers from several states began receiving their second dose of the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine, approved before the Modern shot.
The U.S. government was considering halving the 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 halving the doses would be effective.
Meanwhile, CVS Health Corp. said Wednesday it expects to complete administration of the first doses of COVID-19 vaccines to about 8,000 U.S. nursing homes by Jan. 25.
A massive global vaccination campaign will be needed to establish a level of herd immunity that could end the devastating pandemic that is sweeping through much of the United States and many other countries, with more highly transmissible variants of the virus.
A variant that has swept the UK has been reported in at least five US states, National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins said in an interview with the Washington Post on Wednesday.
“We have now seen the same UK virus in the United States in at least five states, and I would be surprised if that doesn’t grow fast enough,” Collins said, adding, however, that it doesn’t seem to be more serious.
Reports from Maria Caspani, Peter Szekely in New York and Gabriella Borter in Fairfield, Connecticut, Dan Whitcomb and Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Additional reports from Anurag Maan in Bengaluru, Lisa Shumaker in Chicago and Brad Brooks in Lubbock, Texas; Written by Maria Caspani; Edited by Bill Berkrot and Jonathan Oatis