US records 4,000 daily COVID-19 deaths for first time

The United States has exceeded 4,000 daily deaths from the coronavirus for the first time, beating a record set just a day earlier, with the surge being driven across several Sun Belt states that saw spikes over the summer.

The count of Johns Hopkins University The COVID-19 tracker shows the United States had 4,085 deaths on Thursday. The United States had nearly 275,000 new coronavirus cases on the same day.

The figures are another reminder of how things are getting worse after holiday travel and family gatherings, as well as more time indoors during the winter months.

Cases and deaths are skyrocketing in California, Arizona, Texas and Florida. Those four states totaled nearly 1,500 deaths and 80,000 cases on Thursday — numbers comparable to the national totals in October.

Many hospitals in Los Angeles and other hard-hit areas are struggling to keep up and have warned they may need to ration care as critical care beds dwindle. Many already exhausted nurses are now caring for more patients than is generally allowed by state law after the state began issuing waivers that allow hospitals to temporarily circumvent a strict ratio law. nurse-patient.

The biggest fear is that hospitals will be forced to ration care in weeks when people who ignored social distancing rules to gather with friends and relatives for Christmas and New Year start showing up for care. medical.

In Los Angeles County, at Henry Mayo New Hall in Valencia, nurse Nerissa Black says her hospital is overwhelmed with patients, likening the situation in New York to the start of the pandemic.

She has worked there for seven years and heads the telemetry unit where she is assigned to six patients. She can essentially spend 10 minutes with each of them per hour, which includes the time it takes her to change her personal protective equipment and document and coordinate their care.

“It’s very difficult to decide which one should I go to see first: the patient with chest pain or the patient with low oxygen levels,” she said, speaking on a day when she was not working after receiving the second injection. of the Pfizer vaccine.

At St. Joseph’s Hospital in South Los Angeles, nurses on the COVID-19 ward say they are overwhelmed by the death toll.

“Just today we had two deaths in this unit. And that’s pretty much the norm,” Caroline Brandenburger said. “I usually see one or two every shift. Super sad.

“They fight every day and they struggle to breathe every day even with tons of oxygen. And then you see them die,” Brandenburger said. “They just die.”

The outbreak has taken another turn for the worse in Arizona, with the state now leading the nation with the highest COVID-19 diagnosis rate over the past week. From December 30 to January 6, one in 115 people was diagnosed with the virus.

More than 132,000 people nationwide are hospitalized with the virus.

For most people, the virus causes mild or moderate symptoms for up to three weeks, although the elderly and people with existing health conditions can face severe illness and death. The vast majority of people recover.