A New York nurse became the first American to be vaccinated against covid-19 on Monday at the start of a campaign he clings to with hope the country that has already exceeded 300,000 deaths from the pandemic. Sandra Lindsay, a doctor specializing in intensive care, received the vaccine in front of the cameras at the Long Island Jewish Hospital, a large center located in the borough of Queens.
“The first vaccine was administered. Congratulations United States! Congratulations to the whole WORLD!” The outgoing president of the United States, Republican Donald Trump, celebrated on Twitter shortly after.
Soon after, President-elect Joe Biden, who will take office on January 20, tweeted: “Let’s hope, better days are coming.”
The start of vaccination comes six days later than in the United Kingdom, the first country to authorize the immunizer from the Pfizer / BioNTech laboratories. The campaign in the United States began with the shipment of 2.9 million doses to more than 600 points across the country, averaging more than 200,000 infections daily.
The African-American nurse Sandra Lindsay works in the intensive care unit of a hospital in the New York borough of Queens, where last April there were more than 3,500 patients with Covid-19.
“My profession is deeply rooted in science and I can tell you that it is safe to take the vaccine. I have seen the alternative and I don’t want that, so I encourage all of you to get vaccinated, to follow the experts and not give up,” Lindsay stressed in an appearance before the press.
After the injection, the nurse said with a smile that she was “fine” and “relieved”, with a sensation very similar to that of any other puncture.
The vaccination campaign in the United States, which must prioritize health workers and nursing homes in the first place, begins at a time when the pandemic hits the country hard, which on Monday exceeded 300,000 deaths, with more than 16 million of cases.
The United States’ goal is to vaccinate about 20 million people before the end of December, and 100 million before the end of March.
The light at the end of the tunnel
“It is the light at the end of the tunnel, but it is a long tunnel,” warned New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, recalling that it will take “months” before a critical mass of the population is immunized.
Immunologist Anthony Fauci warned that despite vaccination, we must continue to wear a mask and respect physical distance during the coming months.
If “we convince people to get vaccinated (…) and we get (herd immunity) in late spring (boreal), early summer, then in fall we can have a certain degree of relief (…) and some form of normalcy, “he said on MSNBC. Fauci will continue as an advisor to the Biden administration.
The independent count from Johns Hopkins University reported 300,267 deaths, which continues to place the United States as the country with the most deaths in absolute terms, while infections exceed 16.3 million.
The bleak milestone was reached at a time when they are being recorded daily death figures from the disease similar to those caused by the attacks of September 11, 2001 (2,977) or the attack on Pearl Harbor (2,403).
In the first five days of December alone, a million new cases were registered in the country, and in one week of this month, covid-19 surpassed heart disease as the leading cause of death in the US, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The authorities hope that with the Pfizer vaccine – newly authorized in the country – and with the upcoming approval of three others developed by Moderna, Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca, all Americans who wish to can be vaccinated by the end of the second quarter of 2021 .
However, given the complicated logistics and relative shortage of doses, the vast majority of Americans will still have to wait weeks or months to receive the vaccine.
The Institute for Health Metrics and Assessments (IHME) of the University of Washington, whose models for predicting the evolution of the pandemic are often set by the White House, estimates that when President Trump leaves power on January 20 380,000 people will have died, and by April 1, more than 500,000.
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