NEW YORK (Reuters) – More Americans were hospitalized with COVID-19 on Wednesday than at any time since the start of the pandemic, as total coronavirus infections exceeded 21 million, with deaths rising largely in the United States and a historic vaccination effort remained.
US COVID-19 hospitalizations reached a record 130,834 late Tuesday, according to a Reuters balance of public health data, while 3,684 reported deaths were the second highest pandemic death toll in a single day.
That awful charge meant that on Tuesday someone died because of COVID-19 every 24 seconds in the United States. With a total death toll of more than 357,000, one in 914 US residents has died from COVID-19 since the pandemic began, according to a Reuters analysis.
In severely affected California, public health authorities have ordered hospitals in more than a dozen southern and central counties overwhelmed by COVID-19 patients to suspend elective operations for at least three weeks.
The order, issued late Tuesday 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 has been severely expanded.
The total number of COVID-19 cases in the US exceeded 21 million on Wednesday and, with many healthcare systems approaching a breaking point, pressure has increased on local and state officials to speed up the distribution of the two vaccines. authorized by Pfizer Inc. with partner BioNTech SE and Moderna. Inc.
The lack of a federal plan for the crucial final step in introducing vaccines into tens of millions of weapons has left state and local officials responsible for the monumental effort, creating a patchwork of various plans in the United States.
MEGA HUBS VACCINES AND THE NATIONAL GUARD
Some states have called for additional resources to speed up vaccine administration. North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper on Tuesday mobilized the state National Guard to “provide support to local health care providers” to distribute coronavirus vaccines faster.
“We will use all the necessary resources and staff,” Cooper said in a statement.
Maryland State Governor Larry Hogan also announced that emergency support teams from the state National Guard will lend a hand to local health departments in their vaccination efforts.
“At the current rate of allocation,” Hogan said, the state expects to be able to start vaccinating priority group 1b – people aged 75 and over and key frontline workers – by the end of January.
In New York, where Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo faced slow vaccine administration, officials said Wednesday that the city is expanding its “vaccination centers,” which would include 15 locations by Jan. 16, five mega. sites. “The sites will have the capacity to vaccinate 100,000 New Yorkers a week, the official said.
The ambitious goal comes when the city took about 10,000 photos on Tuesday, according to data released on Wednesday.
De Blasio also said in a news briefing that home nurses and some members of the New York police department could receive the vaccine for the first time on Wednesday.
After blaming local officials earlier this week for the slow pace of vaccinations at some New York hospitals, Cuomo said Wednesday that the rate among state-level hospital staff had tripled to 30,000 vaccinations a day on 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 is turning its testing operations into a vaccination center.
Another 3 million doses of the two vaccines were sent to the United States on Tuesday, Acting Secretary Christopher Miller said in a statement, bringing the total to more than 19 million doses in 21 days, of which only a fraction was administered until now .
Both approved vaccines require two doses every three to four weeks. This week, health workers in several states began receiving the second dose of Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine, which was approved before the Modern Shootout.
The US government was considering halving the doses of the Modern vaccine to free up supplies for more vaccinations. But scientists at Moderna and the National Institutes of Health said it could take two months to study whether halved doses would be effective.
Meanwhile, CVS Health Corp. said Wednesday it expects to deliver the first doses of COVID-19 vaccine to nearly 8,000 nursing homes in the United States 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 raging in much of the United States and many other countries with more transmissible variants of the virus.
A variant that has crossed the United Kingdom has been reported in at least five US states, said Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, in an interview with the Washington Post on Wednesday.
“We have now seen the same British virus in the US in at least five states and I would be surprised if this does not grow fast enough,” Collins said, adding that it does not appear to be more severe.
Reporting by Maria Caspani, Peter Szekely in New York and Gabriella Borter in Fairfield, Connecticut, Dan Whitcomb and Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Additional reports by 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