As 1m deaths milestone looms in US, virus rebounds
LOS ANGELES — The United States is set to mark a grim milestone of 1 million coronavirus-related deaths but the COVID-19 pandemic is not done yet, the US media outlet ABC6 said.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expects to see COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths increase as cases are once again on the rise, the report on Saturday said.
“We all may be done with COVID, but COVID is not done with us,” Darren Mareiniss of Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia was quoted as saying.
“We’re in the midst of a wave going up, and when it goes down you can have riskier behavior, but people just need to get that in their heads. They need to make risk/benefit assessments now.”
On Sunday the US logged more than 81.8 million COVID-19 cases, with more than 997,500 related deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University.
COVID-19 hospitalizations have been rising across the country, sparking anxieties about the strain on healthcare, The New York Times reported on Friday.
By Thursday an average of more than 18,000 people with COVID-19 were in hospitals around the country, 20 percent more than two weeks earlier, the US media reported.
Basic rights denied
Throughout the pandemic, prisoners across the US have been deprived of even the most basic protections against COVID-19, a report of the daily The Everett Herald in Washington state said. Prisoners cannot keep social distance and are forced into close contact with those who are sick, it said.
The issue prisoners are experiencing “is not a result of guards’ feelings, but of the structural failures of the system”, the report said. “Simply put, there are too many people in prison.”
On Friday, the first World Trade Organization meeting to discuss a draft agreement to temporarily waive intellectual property rights for COVID-19 vaccines went “very well”, its chair said, although some members voiced reservations.
The WTO’s 164 members on Friday discussed the “outcome document” that stems from months of negotiations between the main parties, the United States, the European Union, India and South Africa, in an effort to break an 18-month deadlock over the issue.
Lansana Gberie of Sierra Leone, who chairs the council that aims to find an agreement on the waiver, told Reuters after the closed-door meeting: “It went very well, and here’s why I say that: No member rejected the outcome as completely unacceptable.”
The WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, who has been involved in brokering the talks and wants a deal by a ministerial conference next month, says an agreement would be “hugely important”.