With 20 million cases, US should buckle up

After a brief but intense celebratory night, January 1 spells some heavy tasks in store for the whole world, particularly for America.

With more than 346,000 deaths and over 20 million confirmed cases, the United States tops the list of 20 countries with the highest recorded infections and deaths in the world.

That’s nearly twice as many as the No. 2 country, India, and nearly one-quarter of the more than 83 million cases globally.

India and Brazil trail behind the US in coronavirus cases at over 10 million and 7 million, respectively. The increase comes as officials race to vaccinate millions of Americans but have come off to a slower start.

The reasons are not far to seek. It has been reported that overworked, underfunded state public health departments have been scrambling to get up to speed on vaccinations even for the frontline workers and long-term care residents who were given priority.

Trump’s attitude towards handling the coronavirus crisis could be responsible. Such is his image that one survey said Germans are more afraid of the policies of Trump than over the virus.

President-elect Joe Biden slammed the Trump regime for the pace of distributing COVID-19 vaccines and vowed to ramp up the current speed of vaccinations. However, Biden acknowledged that it “will still take months to have the majority of Americans vaccinated.”

Republican Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah is also attacking the slow pace of vaccinations against the coronavirus. Romney says it’s “incomprehensible” and “inexcusable” that the Trump administration has not developed an efficient federal vaccination model for the states.

He’s suggesting that public health authorities seek to enlist all retired or active medical professionals who are not otherwise engaged in care, apart from veterinarians, combat medics, medical students and first responders in the effort. He says they could be easily trained to administer the vaccines.

For months, California did many of the right things to avoid a catastrophic surge from the coronavirus pandemic. Now infections are racing out of control. Tens of thousands of Americans have volunteered to test COVID-19 vaccines, but only about half of them got the real thing during trials. Experts now debate whether to offer all volunteers the real thing.

On top of that there seem to be some people out to reportedly sabotage the vaccination drive. Police in Wisconsin say they’ve arrested a hospital employee suspected of intentionally spoiling COVID-19 vaccines.

A report by ABCNews in April said hospitals across the US battling the coronavirus have been consistently reporting shortages of personal protective gear, ventilators and drugs used to help patients with pain management. But medical professionals in the state that’s become the frontline in America’s fight against COVID-19 say they’re concerned about the flow of oxygen itself to patients.

“The hospital was close to running out of oxygen,” said an emergency room doctor at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, New York, which has become known as the epicentre of the outbreak in the state.  The new variant of the coronavirus strain is creating problems and more anxious moments for the people involving in stemming the spread.

Florida health authorities reported finding evidence of the latest US case of the new and apparently more contagious coronavirus strain first seen in England, saying it was detected in a man with no recent travel history.

Scientists in the UK believe the variant is more contagious than previously identified strains. The cases have triggered questions about how the version circulating in England arrived in the US and whether it is too late to stop it now, with top experts saying it is probably already spreading elsewhere in the United States.