US Under Siege From COVID-19 as Hospitals Overwhelmed Before Holidays
Americans were warned again on Tuesday not to travel for Christmas as the latest COVID-19 surge left hospitals struggling to find beds for the sick and political leaders imposed restrictions to try to curb new…
Americans were warned again on Tuesday not to travel for Christmas as the latest COVID-19 surge left hospitals struggling to find beds for the sick and political leaders imposed restrictions to try to curb new infections, making for a grim holiday season.
A new, even more contagious variant of the coronavirus quickly spreading across Britain caused more fear in Americans already weary from nine months of the pandemic and prompted talks among top U.S. officials to ban travel from the United Kingdom
The new coronavirus variant has emerged as the United States grapples with a nationwide spike in infections that added more than a million new cases in just six days, according to a Reuters tally, a total of more than 18 million since the pandemic began.
In California, an epicenter of the latest surge, intensive care unit (ICU) beds were scarce and hospitals said they lacked enough doctors and nurses to care for patients.
“The whole California ICU capacity has been going down. We are all struggling,” said Dr. Imran Mohammed of Sutter Roseville Medical Center, north of Sacramento. “We really don’t want to see more than this. We will be challenged to see further ICU patients and we will have no place eventually.”
Many U.S. states and cities have imposed lockdowns and business closures to try to get a handle on a wave of illness driven by last month’s Thanksgiving gatherings.
Political leaders have asked Americans to stay home for the upcoming holidays to prevent a surge upon the surge threatening to overwhelm healthcare systems, a request that many have defied.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said on Tuesday that the altered coronavirus had not yet been detected in the United States.
U.S. Health Secretary Alex Azar told Fox News that the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, which received U.S. emergency use authorizations this month, should work against the new variant.
Moderna Inc and BioNTech SE, which worked with Pfizer Inc to develop its vaccine, are scrambling to test their shots against the new virus mutations, but expressed confidence in them.