It seems impossible to say for sure how the COVID-19 pandemic will end for the USA, the world’s most affected country. Dr. Anthony Fauci warns about the UK variant of the coronavirus that spreads rapidly across the USA, and that’s not even the worst part.
An article from AP News reveals that 2 in 5 Americans live where the pandemic disease is straining hospital ICUs, where only about 15% of beds are still available. Hundreds of units are struggling to handle record numbers of COVID-19 patients, and hiring temporary travelling nurses at soaring rates became a mandatory option.
US hospitals approaching breaking point has doubled
According to an Associated Press analysis regarding federal hospital data, the share of hospitals from the US close to the breaking point has doubled since November.
Dr. Marc Boom, Houston Methodist CEO, reveals more about the awful situation that the hospitals are going through:
There’s a lot of these agencies that are out there charging absolutely ridiculous sums of money to get ICU nurses in,
They go to California, which is in the midst of a surge, but they poach some ICU nurses there, send them to Texas, where they charge inordinate amounts to fill in gaps in Texas, many of which are created because nurses in Texas went to Florida or back to California.
Dr. Cameron Mantor, the OU Medicine Officer in Oklahoma City, suggests that even with the vaccination program, hope remains dim as ICU cases are keep mounting.
The USA has surpassed 25 million reported COVID-19 infections, while the death toll is also terrifying: over 431,000 patients lost the battle with the coronavirus. As for the rest of the world, the situation is also horrible: there’s a total of over 100 million worldwide infections with COVID-19 and more than 2.1 million deaths caused by the disease.
