COVID-19 cases are surging across much of the US south and west as familiar scenes of weary doctors and nurses in packed hospitals replay across a whole new region.
In Washington, the US Congress is gearing up to pass another economic stimulus package. Optimistic economists once thought such a package could be unnecessary, but COVID-19 is now expected to continue to hurt the economy.
The White House is reportedly trying to hurt any resultant bill.
Photo: EPA-EFE
The administration of US President Donald Trump is pushing to block billions of dollars for state-run testing and tracing, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and attempts to combat the pandemic at the Pentagon and the US Department of State, the Washington Post reported late on Saturday.
The US is now logging more than 70,000 new COVID-19 infections a day, according to Johns Hopkins University, up from a low of about 20,000 early last month.
More than 3.7 million people in the US have been diagnosed with COVID-19 and more than 140,000 have died since January, when the disease was first found in the US.
“People continue to regard the virus as a political scheme or conspiracy theory,” Chad Dowell, a doctor in Indianola, Mississippi, said in a Facebook post released by South Sunflower County Hospital.
“People continue to ignore recommended guidelines on how to help slow the virus’ spread. People continue to complain about wearing a mask. We’ve got to do better as a community,” he said.
Experts consider rising hospitalization rates a likely harbinger for a surge in US deaths, which, as a lagging indicator, have remained relatively low.
In the past week, hospitals from Florida to southern California have filled with patients in need of intensive care.
“All of our ICU [intensive-care unit] beds are full,” Risa Moriarity, the University of Mississippi medical center executive vice-chair, emergency medicine, told local news station WAPT. “We have patients in the emergency department who need ICU beds. They’re on ventilators.”
At Tampa general hospital in Florida, Jason Wilson, the associate medical director, told the Washington Post: “We can withstand a disaster, but we can’t withstand a disaster every single day. How many jumbo jet crashes can you handle before you run out of capacity? That’s what we’re facing.”
In spring, Congress approved the largest-ever stimulus package, of US$2.2 trillion in aid. That money went to help flagging businesses shut down by the pandemic, and gave people on unemployment an additional US$600 a week.
Those unemployment benefits are expected to run out at the end of this month, if Congress does not act.
At the beginning of this month, the unemployment rate was above 11 percent, with 17.8 million out of work.
Republicans are demanding businesses receive liability protection from COVID-19-related injuries, as a part of the new aid package.
The Trump administration has provided mixed signals about what it would approve.
Trump has repeatedly said that the US should conduct fewer tests, so that fewer cases would be confirmed.
On Saturday, Sam Hammond of the right-leaning think tank the Niskanen Center, which has been working with US Senate Republicans on testing legislation, told the Post that such politicians knew cases were surging in many of their states.
“Senate Republicans have asked for funding to help states purchase test kits in bulk,” he said. “As it currently stands, the main bottleneck to a big ramp-up in testing is less technical than the White House’s own intransigence.”
Even amid the pandemic, Republicans are still hoping to hold local and national conventions, in line with the US president’s desire for large crowds to cheer him on in the presidential election campaign.
Republicans in Texas are locked in a court battle to try to salvage the remainder of their state convention. They had hoped to bring thousands to a convention center in Houston, one of the worst COVID-19 hotspots in the nation.
City officials canceled the convention on the grounds it would become a “super-spreader” event.
Texas Republicans sued, and were blocked on appeal, to be left with a virtual-only convention, although delegates have arrived in the city, Bloomberg News has reported.
The growing pandemic sets an ominous tone for the Republican National Convention, set to take place in Jacksonville, Florida, late next month. It has already moved once.
Officials in Charlotte, North Carolina, barred the convention in their city, after COVID-19 cases began to rise.
In 2016, 50,000 people flooded into Cleveland, Ohio, for the Republican convention.
Local officials are to require masks at the Jacksonville convention, which would be scaled back.
The Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel last week announced that 7,000 people would be allowed to attend the largest event, Trump’s acceptance speech, the Washington Post reported.
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