WASHINGTON – On Saturday I intended the University of Virginia football team to face Louisville, but the coronavirus got in the way: nine Louisville team players had already fallen ill, then several others became ill, seven of them quarantined. The game was postponed.
In central Massachusetts, 150 cases of coronavirus have been connected to the Crossroads Community Church in Fitchburg. “The videos and photos posted on Crossroads’ public Facebook page in recent weeks didn’t seem to show a social estre or mask,” a report said. .
Northern California counties need to put in place new restrictions, and officials warn of “widespread” transmission “across the state. “
And in Amarillo, Texas, a kindergarten woman reportedly died of COVID-19, the disease through coronavirus. In Missouri, the disease claimed the lives of an election official.
The coronavirus pandemic that killed more than a quarter of a million Americans took a break from last weekend’s Halloween break, the presidential election that followed, or the days after the political unrest that continued over the weekend.
The frustratingly resistant pathogen has also shown a lot of sympathy for Americans’ growing tiredness, their preference to see schools and business reopened, for the relentless communication of “social estportation” and “mods. “learning “are relegated to a remote memory.
In any case, the virus appears to be strengthening, killing more than 1,000 Americans each day this week and recording more than 100,000 infections daily. More than 50,000 people across the country are hospitalized. The percentage of positive coronavirus diagnostic tests rose to 8. 2% this week; Last week’s percentage of positive tests decreased particularly through 7. 2%.
“The numbers are pretty scary,” says Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of Baylor National School of Tropical Medicine, taking an inventory of the national situation. While talking to Yahoo News on Thursday, the country was heading to a record 133,000 new instances. Hospitalizations have also increased rapidly, leading to fears that we may not be able to review what we saw in the spring and early summer: overcrowded extensive care units, overcrowded hospitals, deaths that may also have been prevented.
“It’s a massacre, ” Hotez. We’ll have to act. “
But some Trump management officials admit the public has little appetite for the kinds of lockdowns that took place last spring. Some parts of Europe have recently reestablished the blockades, this time the measures have met with some public resistance.
In some neighborhoods, a sense of resignation prevails. The sentiment was more productive summarized through Mark Meadows, the White House staff leader, who last October made an astonishing confession to CNN’s Jake Tapper: “We’re not going to the pandemic,” the former North Carolina congressman said. “We will monitor the fact that we receive vaccines, curative products and other mitigations. “
Meanwhile, the federal reaction is in disarray, and President Trump feeds through the spread of false data about an election that turned out to have been lost but remained too close to be called up on Saturday morning. He led a relentless series of election demonstrations that, according to a Stanford study, may have resulted in up to 30,000 new infections and 700 more deaths.
Trump himself hit the virus and was hospitalized last month. On Friday, the news announced that Meadows had contracted the coronavirus, one of the many White House or crusade aides who found fate is not surprising, given Trump’s long-standing resistance in Trump’s inner circle to take appropriate action.
The country is caught in a “perfect storm,” says Dr. Uché Blackstock, founder of Advancing Health Equity, a nonprofit medical organization and medical collaborator for Yahoo News. “People are tired of dressing in masks and not seeing the ones they enjoy. “, blackstock says, many have resorted to smaller meetings that are more likely to spread the virus than other people believe.
And all this is being transmitted as temperatures drop as winter approaches. Viruses have a tendency to spread faster in a bloody climate. People returning indoors, after months of looking to live outdoors as much as possible, will only facilitate this spread. “The timing couldn’t be worse, ” said Blackstock, and we’re not even at the heart of it yet. “This is likely to take place in January and February, at the height of winter.
“We’ll see the numbers happen,” he warns.
Without saying that, the White House has followed the technique of collective immunity favored through Dr. Scott Atlas, the Stanford neuroradiologist who whispered Trump’s coronavirus last summer after a series of appearances on Fox News. This strategy may be preferable in the absence of an effective vaccine or therapeutic, it is preferable to allow the virus to become in the population, while protecting the most vulnerable.
The less vulnerable would become inflamed but, in doing so, would obtain antibodies that, when provided in a sufficient number in the general population, would prevent the spread of the virus. This is the style that has been attempted in Sweden, which has been promoted through conservative politicians and some fitness professionals in the United States.
Criticism of Atlas and his technique is fading in the medical community. “He has no experience in this area,” Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of Brown Public Health School, told NPR in September. Blackstock, for its part, estimates that a non-interventionist technique would result in several million additional COVID-19 deaths in the United States.
Trump insisted in the last days of the electoral crusade that the public would hear a little bit about the fatal virus after November 3. ON NOVEMBER 4th, YOU WON’T HEAR SO MUCH ABOUT IT, WE TURNED THE !!!, complained about on Twitter.
Neither Trump nor Vice President Mike Pence, who heads the White House Coronavirus Working Group, has held a briefing on the pandemic for many weeks.
The White House questions the concept that the pandemic is no longer a priority. A member of the White House Coronavirus Working Group told Yahoo News that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Health and Human Services, and dr. Deborah Birx, a member of the White House working group, “are still working with states to see progress in their spaces and paintings through possible mitigation strategies.
Birx also recently drafted a memorandum stating that the country “is entering the maximum stage of concern and fatality of this pandemic. “And he challenged Atlas’ perception that padlocks were the only means available to public fitness officials. “These are not padlocks — they haven’t been locked since March or April,” Birx wrote. “This is a balanced competitive technique that is not being implemented. “
Birx’s memo seems to have been ignored.
Blackstock says public fitness officials want to take a transparent, centralized approach, rather than allowing the state to make decisions about the pandemic as if it were a separate country. She says a popularized “risk relief approach” in the fight against HIV/AIDS, in which Birx has been a leader for 3 decades, perhaps only paintings opposed to coronavirus, but this would require transparent messages on masks, as well as increased availability of immediate coronavirus tests.
It doesn’t help that Trump and his supporters have criticized experts in their own administration. Trump said at a pre-election political rally that he could soon fire Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has been the most trusted member of his coronavirus working group. Steve Bannon, the former White House-leading political strata, said last week on his radio show that Fauci deserves to be beheaded.
In a statement through a member of the press staff, CDC Director Robert Redfield said the country had entered “a critical phase of the pandemic. ” That is why it is so vital that we all continue to be diligent in our efforts to defeat the virus and to protect ourselves, our families, and our communities.
“To prevent this pandemic, we will want all our equipment: hand washing, masks, social remoteness and, very soon, vaccinations. Together, these teams will be offering the most productive opportunity to make our communities, schools and fitness systems general again. as soon as possible. “
If he wins the election, Biden can simply put into force a national mask mandate and take other steps to explain and normalize the nation’s response, but there is not much he can do to drive the progress of a vaccine, nor can he save you. other people attending parties at home or rushing to bars.
Hotez says treatments are coming, like a vaccine. For now, however, the country will have to arm itself with patience. “We just have to get this winter,” he says.
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