Current Situation with Covid19 in the United States
By Garrett Belardi
National News Staff Writer
According to the World Health Organization, so far in the United States, there have been a total of just over 9.2 million cases recorded with a little over 200,000 deaths so far. Graphs within the WHO’s website indicate that the rate of cases continues to climb within the U.S, but that the rate of deaths has stayed very consistent despite the significant increase in cases. Potentially a good sign of things to come as our health system learns to better treat and cope with the virus. The rate of cases per day has skyrocketed so significantly that on November 1st the U.S broke the record and had a recording of 100,000 cases in one day alone, the rate has since dropped again but not by much. “We are again in danger of losing control of this pandemic in Iowa,” Suresh Gunasekaran, chief executive of the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, wrote in an urgent appeal to the state’s residents. “Our COVID positivity rates skyrocketed twice before, but this is the first time we have seen rates this high while also dealing with record patient hospitalizations.” Some hospitals in Iowa are rescheduling elective surgeries, ones that are not a health emergency, in order to free up more beds for the influx of recent COVID patients.
“The strategy, if you can summarize in one word, is hope,” said Dr. Carlos del Rio, executive associate dean of the Emory School of Medicine and Grady Health System in Georgia. “And hope is not a strategy.” What’s more, as Covid-19 cases flood, the monetary recuperation wavers, and Covid government help run out, the absence of an organized reaction to the pandemic during the interregnum will have genuine outcomes, as indicated by specialists. “We are heading into the very worst of the pandemic right now,” said Dr. Megan Ranney, an emergency room doctor at Brown University who has lobbied to protect healthcare workers during the pandemic. “The degree of spread of this infection and its toll on our country is going to be, to a large extent, determined by what happens in the next two months.” The swell of fall Covid-19 cases is now ending up being the most extreme time frame for new contaminations of the whole pandemic. By different tallies, the US broke a world record for new cases – 100,000 out of a day – this week. Those new diseases will forecast new hospitalizations and in the end passings. Effectively, in excess of 230,000 Americans have passed on from Covid-19.
But there is not all bad news, in a more uplifting hopeful turn of events, a recent study that the New York Times wrote found that there is a very limited transmission of COVID from children to adults. Obviously, a big concern was that when schools began to reopen, kids would catch COVID and pass it along to their parents, putting them out of work or even worse. Though transmission seems to be slowed from child to adult that does not make things much better. New York Times also found that “More than 61,000 children in the U.S. were diagnosed with Covid-19 last week — more than in any other week during the pandemic, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association reported Monday.” As schools continue to reopen and stay open more and more kids seem to continue to contract COVID, whether that be through poor management, or the impossibility to control the spread of the virus overall. One school in the District of Columbia said that they had revised and currently had no more plans to bring elementary school kids back next week after teachers staged a protest against the district’s current plan of action regarding the reopening and continuation of in-person schooling during the pandemic. Finally, in Massachusetts on Friday the state enacted new COVID restrictions such as mask mandates and tougher gathering regulations. In a similar effort, Denver enacted a curfew calling for all residents to be in their homes by 10 pm until 5 am until December 7th in hopes to further stave off the spread of the coronavirus. Election day may have been the start of the second wave in cases as one poll worker already passed away in Missouri and cases continue to soar while everyone is scrambling to enact their rights and vote.
With no vaccine in sight, there is no answer to when the virus will disappear and when normalcy will return.
Contact Garrett at garrett.belardi@student.shu.edu