Hospitals under strain as cases mount
NEW YORK/AMSTERDAM: Nearly twothirds of US states were in a danger zone of coronavirus spread yesterday and six, including election battleground Wisconsin, reported a record oneday increase in Covid19 deaths, while the pandemic’s resurgence in Europe strained hospitals.
Coronavirus deaths hit daily records in Hawaii, Kansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Montana and Wisconsin, a state that also reported a record daily increase in new cases, as did Colorado, Illinois, Kentucky and Ohio, a Reuters analysis showed.
Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers said a field hospital in the Milwaukee suburbs that opened last week had admitted its first Covid19 patient.
European case numbers, brought largely under control by lockdowns in March and April, are also surging, and authorities in countries from Poland to Portugal have expressed alarm at the renewed crisis confronting their health infrastructures.
Belgium, struggling with what its health minister called a ‘‘tsunami’’ of infections, is postponing all nonessential hospital procedures, and similar measures are looming in other countries.
‘‘If the rhythm of the past week continues, rescheduling and suspending some nonpriority activities will become unavoidable,’’ medical director at Barcelona’s Hospital del Mar Julio Pascual said.
A Belgian official said another lockdown could be imposed as soon as next week in the country, which has one of the world’s highest fatality rates per capita.
In the US, President Donald Trump has opposed restrictions, saying economic recovery depends on people being able to return to normal life.
The coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 221,000 people in the US and thrown millions out of work, has taken a toll on Trump’s reelection prospects.
Negotiations on a new package of coronavirus economic aid are dragging on and a deal appears unlikely before the November 3 election.
Thirtytwo of 50 states had entered a danger zone with more than 100 new cases per 100,000 residents over the past week, and nationally the case rate had reached its highest level since a peak in July, Reuters found.
A block of states in the Midwest and mountain regions from Idaho to Illinois were a red zone, along with Alaska, denoting rapidly rising infection.
Nationally, cases have been trending higher for five weeks, rising to 60,000 on average over the past seven days from a recent low of 35,000 a day in midSeptember.
‘‘We are not far from the period of exponential, explosive growth of #covid19 in the US,’’ former Baltimore health commissioner Dr Leana Wen said on Twitter.
As in Europe, the spike in US cases raised fears hospitals could become overwhelmed.
Dutch health authorities said if the number of Covid19 patients in hospital wards continued to grow, threequarters of regular care might have to be scrapped by the end of November, and there were similar warnings from Czech authorities.
‘‘We have hit a wall on clinical beds,’’ the spokesman for the Dutch hospital association NVZ, Wouter van der Hors, said.
German Health Minister Jens Spahn tested positive, as did Brazilian Health Minister Eduardo Pazuello.
To complicate Europe’s situation, widespread coronavirus fatigue and the frightening economic impact of the crisis have eroded broad public support for the lockdowns ordered earlier to stop health services being overwhelmed.
Unwilling to shut down their countries again, governments have sought less drastic measures to limit public gatherings and balance the need to keep their economies turning with holding back the pandemic.
According to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, Europe has registered more than 5 million cases and 200,000 deaths, with new cases beginning to spike sharply from the end of September.
While well below levels at the peak of the crisis six months ago, Covid19 hospital admissions and occupancy were again high — defined as at least 25% of the peak of the pandemic — or rising in 20 countries, its latest weekly summary said last week.
Authorities in Lombardy, the Italian region at the centre of the earlier wave, yesterday ordered the reopening of special temporary intensive care units set up in Milan and Bergamo that were shut down when case numbers receded.
Already, some regional health authorities in Germany, one of the countries that dealt with the first wave most effectively, have agreed to take in intensive care patients from other countries.
Yesterday, authorities in Ireland, where the fiveday case average has tripled since the start of October, said there were no longer enough officials to keep its contacttracing system working. — Reuters