A lame-duck presidency and political gridlock after a bitterly fought election are set to worsen the US’s coronavirus crisis just as the pandemic enters its deadliest phase, according to health experts.
With two months to go before a presidential handover from Donald Trump to Joe Biden, the federal government’s strategy for containing the virus has experts worried.
Outside of embracing conspiracy theories, Trump administration officials appear to have pinned their hopes on improved testing and eventual vaccine approval.
“The strategy, if you can summarize in one word, is hope,” said Dr Carlos del Rio, executive associate dean of the Emory School of Medicine and Grady Health System in Georgia. “And hope is not a strategy.”
And as Covid-19 cases surge, the economic recovery falters and coronavirus government aid runs out, the lack of a coordinated response to the pandemic during the interregnum will have serious consequences, according to experts.
“We are heading into the very worst of the pandemic right now,” said Dr Megan Ranney, an emergency room doctor at Brown University who has lobbied to protect healthcare workers during the pandemic. “The degree of spread of this infection and its toll on our country is going to be, to a large extent, determined by what happens in the next two months.”
The swell of autumn Covid-19 cases is already proving to be the most intense period for new infections of the entire pandemic. By various counts, the US broke a world record for new cases – 100,000 in a day – this week. Those new infections will portend new hospitalizations, and eventually deaths. Already, more than 230,000 Americans have died from Covid-19.
“If we don’t do anything to stop it, we are in the trajectory going straight up,” said Del Rio.
Del Rio predicted the United States could see 200,000 cases a day by Thanksgiving, if Americans do not adopt social distancing and universal masking immediately.
There are other grim signs. The nursing home industry, which cares for America’s most medically fragile residents, has warned that Covid-19 cases among the elderly and infirm are growing because of intense spread in surrounding communities.
“It is incredibly frustrating,” said Mark Parkinson, president and CEO of the American Health Care Association, an industry group for private nursing homes. “If everybody would wear a mask and social distance to reduce the level of Covid in the community, we know we would dramatically reduce these rates in long-term care facilities.”
Nursing homes house less than 1% of the population, but represent more than 40% of deaths.
Hospital administrators are scaling back non-urgent, but medically necessary, surgeries which serve as one of their largest sources of profit. State governments in the upper midwest are setting up field hospitals, but staffing will be difficult with increased spread and worker burnout.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
