US on brink of rampant pandemic
Several states report record deaths, cases
Nearly two-thirds of US states were yesterday said to be in severe danger of coronavirus spread and six, including election battleground Wisconsin, reported a record one-day increase in Covid-19 deaths.
Coronavirus deaths hit fresh daily records in Hawaii, Kansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Montana and Wisconsin, a state that also reported a record daily increase in new cases together with Colorado, Illinois, Kentucky and Ohio.
Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers announced that a field hospital in the Milwaukee suburbs had admitted its first Covid-19 patient since it opened last week. “Folks, please stay home,” he said. “Help us protect our communities from this highly contagious virus and avoid further strain on our hospitals.”
Meanwhile, European infections, which were brought largely under control by unprecedented lockdowns in March and April, are also surging and authorities in countries from Poland to Portugal have expressed mounting alarm at the renewed crisis confronting their health infrastructure.
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 non-priority activities will become unavoidable,” said Julio Pascual, medical director at Barcelona’s Hospital del Mar.
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 United States, President Donald Trump has repeatedly opposed re-imposing restrictions, saying economic recovery depended on people being able to return to normal life.
The coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 221,000 people in the United States and thrown millions out of work, has taken a toll on Mr Trump’s re-election prospects. Negotiations on a new package of coronavirus economic aid have dragged on and a deal appears unlikely before the Nov 3 election.
Thirty-two of 50 states are in a danger zone, with more than 100 new cases per 100,000 residents over the past week, and infections nationally are close to July’s peak.
A block of states in the Midwest and mountain regions from Idaho to Illinois were a red zone along with Alaska, denoting rapidly rising infections.
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 mid-September.
US public health experts have warned for months that a premature rollback of social-distancing policies and politicising the wearing of masks could trigger a resurgence of infections.
“We are not far from the period of exponential, explosive growth of #Covid19 in the US,” said Dr Leana Wen, former Baltimore health commissioner, on Twitter.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday tightened its definition of “close contact” exposure that puts an individual at risk, a standard that triggers contact tracing and could have an impact on schools and workplaces.
Rather than spending 15 minutes at once within 1.8 metres of an infected person to be considered close contact, the agency said the definition is now 15 minutes over 24 hours.
Similar to Europe, the spike in US cases raised fears hospitals could become overwhelmed.
Dutch health authorities said that if the number of Covid-19 patients in hospital wards continued to grow, three-quarters of regular care may have to be scrapped by the end of November.
To complicate Europe’s situation, widespread coronavirus fatigue and the frightening economic impact of the crisis have eroded broad public support for the lockdowns that were ordered earlier in the year to stop health services from being overwhelmed.
The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control says the continent has had more than five million cases and 200,000 deaths, with numbers spiking this month.