One year after becoming the global epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic, New York and New Jersey once again lead the list of states in the United States with the highest rates of infection.
Even as the vaccination campaign has intensified, the number of new cases in New Jersey has increased 37% in just over a month, to about 23,600 infections every seven days.
About 50,000 people a week are testing positive for the virus in New York, and that number hasn’t changed much since mid-February. The two states now occupy the 1st. and 2nd place with the highest number of new infections per capita among the states of the country.
New Jersey has reported about 647 new cases per 100,000 residents in the past 14 days. New York has averaged 548.
Better than last january
Neither entity is experiencing a situation like the one they had last spring, when hospitals, and morgues, were overwhelmed. And like the rest of the country, both are in a much better place than they were in January, when the peak of the pandemic’s winter rebound was recorded.
But the lack of improvement or even a setback in recent weeks has raised concerns that states are resuming economic activities too quickly and people are letting their guard down a lot, just as possibly more contagious variants of the virus are circulating on the loose. broader way.
“When we see cases leveling off or increasing, that’s when policies need to be rethought,” said Roy Gulick, director of the division of infectious diseases at Weill Cornell School of Medicine and New York Presbyterian Hospital / Weill Cornell Medical Center. .
In February, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo allowed the state’s largest stadiums to once again host sporting events and concerts, only at 10% of normal capacity.
Theaters in New York City have also reopened. Restaurants can now operate at 50% capacity in Manhattan and 75% in other parts of the state. Indoor exercise classes have also resumed.
Reapertura similar
New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy has led a similar reopening; restaurants in the state have also been able to operate at half capacity, and barbershops, beauty salons and other personal care establishments have resumed operations. And that has also happened in other parts of the country.
Meanwhile, intensive care doctors in Paris said the spike in coronavirus cases could soon overwhelm the ability to care for the sick in the French capital’s hospitals, and they could be forced to choose which patients to treat.
The grim warning was published on Sunday in an opinion piece signed by 41 doctors from the Paris region and published in the newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche. It comes at a time when President Emmanuel Macron has staunchly defended his decision not to completely confine France again, as he did last year.
Since January, the government has imposed a nationwide night curfew and implemented a set of other restrictions after that.
Higher pressure
However, with infections on the rise and hospitals running out of intensive care beds, doctors have lobbied for a nationwide lockdown in France.
Doctors from the Paris region who wrote in a newspaper noted that: “We have never seen a situation like this, not even during the worst (terrorist) attacks” in the French capital, especially in the attacks perpetrated by Islamic State extremists in 2015 that They killed 130 people and filled emergency rooms with the wounded.
321,000 in Mexico
The Mexican government admitted on Saturday that the actual death toll from the coronavirus pandemic has exceeded 321,000 people, almost 60% more than the official figure confirmed by diagnostic tests, 201,429.
Mexico does few diagnostic tests, and since hospitals were overwhelmed, many Mexicans died at home without taking the test. The only way to get a clear picture is to review excess mortality and death certificates.
The government quietly released the data in a report on Saturday, which associated 294,287 deaths to COVID-19 between the start of the pandemic and February 14. Since February 15 there have been another 26,772 deaths confirmed with diagnostic tests.
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