Even as the US registered more coronavirus deaths in a single day than ever before – nearly 3,900 – on Wednesday, the mob attack on the US Capitol was laying bare some of the same political divisions that have hampered the fight against the pandemic.
The virus is surging in almost every state, with California particularly hard hit.
Skyrocketing deaths and infections in the state are threatening to force hospitals to ration care and essentially decide who lives and who dies.
“Folks are gasping for breath. Folks look like they’re drowning when they are in bed right in front of us,” said Dr Jeffrey Chien, an emergency room physician at Santa Clara Valley regional medical center.
He urged people to do their part to help slow the spread. “I’m begging everyone to help us out because we aren’t the frontline. We’re the last line,” he said.
About 1.9 million people around the world have died of the coronavirus, more than 360,000 in the US alone, the highest national death toll on Earth by far, with also the world’s highest number of cases, at more than 21m, according to the Johns Hopkins coronavirus research center.
December was by far America’s deadliest month yet, and health experts are warning that January could be more terrible still because of family gatherings and travel over the holidays, while administration of the coronavirus vaccines approved so far for emergency use in the US has fallen far behind the federal government’s own goals.
A new, more contagious variant of the virus is spreading around the globe and in the US.
Few pro-Trump rioters in Washington on Wednesday were wearing face masks, despite crowding closely together first at a rally that the president addressed outside the White House and then in the corridors of Congress after they invaded the Capitol.
Trump has long downplayed the virus and scorned masks, and many of his ardent supporters have followed his example.
“The domestic terrorists overran the Capitol police, just as the virus has been allowed to overrun Americans,” said Eric Topol, the head of Scripps Research Translational Institute.
He added: “The US lost control of a Trump-incited mob and a Trump-played-down pandemic virus.”
Some of the forces contributing to the eruption of violence on Wednesday were partially foreseen by experts in global disease planning when they held a tabletop exercise in 2019, said Eric Toner, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, who directed the drill.
“We did consider the possibility of active disinformation and using a pandemic for political gain,” Toner said. “Real life turned out to be much worse.”
The outbreak has been especially dire in California, which reported its second-highest number of daily coronavirus deaths, with 459. The state also registered more than a quarter-million new weekly cases.
Only Arizona tops California in cases per resident.
Los Angeles county, the nation’s most populous with 10 million residents, and nearly two dozen other counties have essentially run out of intensive care unit beds.
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