In the past week, 1486 people died of Corona in Florida – more than ever before during the pandemic: The US state of Florida is currently firmly in the grip of the Delta variant. Over 21,000 new corona infections are registered every day. The undertakers can hardly keep up.
“It is too much. There are too many dead, ”reports a woman who is familiar with death: Shortly before the pandemic, Jacquelyn Graham-Townes took over her father’s funeral home in Jacksonville (Florida). She had to bury fourteen corona victims in just one week – the youngest of them was 21 years old. “It’s like the lock gates have opened,” she told USA Today. What is happening now is worse than anything Jacksonville has seen in the past year.
Florida reports the highest number of corona cases in the United States
No other state in the US is currently reporting as many new corona infections as Florida. On Monday there were 31,164 new cases, the seven-day mean is currently 21,302 reports per day. Only seven percent of the US population live in the state – yet 18 percent of the patients currently being treated for a corona infection in the US are in hospital there. According to Johns Hopkins University, the intensive care beds are 95 percent full – more than half of them with corona patients.
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The current wave of pandemics mainly affects the unvaccinated. More than 90 percent of corona patients in US hospitals are not vaccinated. This is reported by the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”. The vaccination rates are particularly low in the southern states. In Tennessee, just under 42.5 percent of residents are fully vaccinated, according to Johns Hopkins University. In Florida, it’s already 53.7 percent, but there is a big difference between people over and under 65 years of age. The result: the patients who end up in hospitals or even die are getting younger and younger.
Corona deaths: Undertakers can hardly keep up
The high number of deaths pushes undertakers to their limits in many places: There is an influx of corpses like they have never seen before, reports the local broadcaster “WFLA”. “In the area where the bodies are stored before cremation, the bodies are piled up to the ceiling,” said a funeral home from Winter Garden, Orange County. The staff work day and night to bury the dead.
But despite the devastating situation, Republicans in Florida continue to rail against corona measures and vaccinations. Governor Ron DeSantis rejects new requirements. The CDC health authority recently appealed to schoolchildren to wear masks again because of the Delta variant. DeSantis doesn’t want to hear about it: “Forcing children to wear a mask is bad policy,” said the governor. The decision must be left to the parents.
DeSantis wasn’t too good for an absurd swipe at US President Joe Biden. Biden’s lax migration policy on the border with Mexico is to blame for the increase in corona infections. The governor said he had “imported more virus from all over the world through the open southern border”. However, the major cities of Florida are almost 2,000 kilometers from the Texas border.
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