With over 100,000 coronavirus cases reported nationwide, the daily COVID-19 cases have reached a six-month high in the United States as multiple states with lower vaccination rates continue to reel under the Delta variant.
Last week, half of the country caseload was reported from seven US states – Florida, Texas, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi – with the lowest vaccination rates, White House COVID-19 coordinator Jeff Zients told reporters.
Meanwhile, a city in Texas, Austin used ing its emergency alert system to let residents in the Texas capital city know that the local state of the pandemic is “dire.”
Austin has a population of almost 2.4 million people with intensive-care unit beds down to six and 313 ventilators, Bloomberg reported.
“The situation is critical. Our hospitals are severely stressed and there is little we can do to alleviate their burden with the surging cases,” Public Health Medical Director Desmar Walkes said in a statement Saturday, calling attention towards an imminent “catastrophe”.
President Joe Biden, meanwhile, called the spike a “tragedy”. “Today, about 400 people will die because of the Delta variant in this country. A tragedy, because virtually all of these deaths were preventable if people had gotten vaccinated,” President Biden said at an event.
A Reuters report shows that the seven-day average of new reported cases reached nearly 95,000, a five-fold increase in less than a month.
A Harris County judge, Lina Hidalgo, wrote a scathing tweet saying, “We’re seeing terrifying #COVID19 trends in our hospitals. At this point if you’re unvaccinated by choice, you’re complicit in this crisis.” Hidalgo is the top official of Harris County, the most populous county in Texas.
Urging Americans to vaccinate and pace up the process, White House press secretary Jen Psaki had last week said, “This is not March 2020, or even January 2021. We’re not going to lock down our economy or our schools because our country’s in a much stronger place than when we took office thanks to the President’s leadership in vaccinating the American people and getting economic relief to those who need it. We’ve been preparing like Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts for this moment and the potential that there would be ups and downs in our recovery.”
The subtext to Psaki’s statement is that the vaccines and masks are there for people to use and even though this surge will affect everyone’s life in the US, it’s not going to shut down the country again.
As American schoolkids look at returning to the classroom, CNN’s Covid-19 headlines scrolled ominously.
Grim pictures of a baby — an 11-month-old girl with Covid-19 — being lifted onto an air ambulance to take her 150 miles away because of a shortage of pediatric beds in the Houston area was more evidence that the Delta variant is striking children in new ways.
That hospitals in Florida, Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana are overwhelmed is not news. That children can’t find ICU beds is a development.
More than 900 students and a dozen teachers were exposed as the second week of school comes to an end in Marion, Arkansas, and the district grapples with an outbreak of Covid-19 cases that saw 47 students and eight staff members test positive. The vaccinated — 54 students and five staff members — were able to avoid quarantine.
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