The United States surpassed 250,000 deaths from coronavirus on Wednesday, while New York announced that it will close public schools again to contain a second wave and in Europe the death rate increases.
The United States reached the 250,000 death toll from COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic on Wednesday, according to the Johns Hopkins University tally.
The country, which had more than a million new cases last week, is the most affected in the world by the virus, ahead of Brazil and India.
In the absence of a national strategy, US states and cities have imposed various restrictions ranging from confinement to banning social gatherings or eating inside restaurants.
The closure of schools in New York took place despite the encouraging announcement by the American laboratories Pfizer and German BioNTech that their vaccine against covid-19 is 95% effective, similar to that of its competitor Moderna (94.5% ).
This figure is better than the partial results published last week and which showed “more than 90%” of effectiveness.
In New York, however, Mayor Bill de Blasio said the city’s 1,800 public schools will offer classes only online starting this Thursday for an indefinite period, because the positive test rate exceeded the average of 3% for seven days.
“We must fight the second wave,” he said.
The deputy director of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), Jarbas Barbosa, warned about the record of hospitalizations for covid-19 in the United States (almost 77,000).
“We already know that when our healthcare facilities are overwhelmed, our ability to treat those who are seriously ill is limited,” he said.
Vaccines are not a magic bullet, and countries will have to “climb the hill” for the time being without them, warned World Health Organization emergency director Michael Ryan.
“I think we will have to wait four to six months” before we can reach “a significant level of vaccination,” Ryan said in an outreach session on social media.
Despite the restrictions, the world has so far registered 55.8 million cases of covid-19, with more than 1.3 million deaths, according to the latest AFP count.
– The vaccine race –
The United States, Europe and other countries have already reserved hundreds of millions of doses of the vaccine from Pfizer and BioNTech. The group hopes to be able to produce 50 million doses this year, which could vaccinate 25 million people (due to the two-dose regimen). By 2021, it aims to manufacture 1.3 billion.
Russia also announced that it has a vaccine that it claims is more than 90% effective.
Several international laboratories are in the final stages of testing for their vaccines, which allows us to wait for the launch of vaccination campaigns for the last weeks of 2020 in the United States, and the beginning of 2021 in other countries.
Vaccinating 20% of the population in Latin America and the Caribbean (about 126 million people) against the new coronavirus will cost more than 2 billion dollars, Barbosa said.
– More deaths in Europe –
Although the infection rate in Europe has fallen, the WHO said that mortality increased 18% last week, compared to the previous one.
46% of new cases in the world and 49% of deaths last week occurred in Europe, he said.
Europe is the region with the most cases of the virus in the world, more than 15 million according to an AFP count, although Latin America and the Caribbean is the one that registers the most deaths: more than 426,000 deaths in a total of 12.1 million infected.
The pandemic seems out of control in several places, such as southern Italy, for example, where it threatens to overwhelm the healthcare system. Or in Switzerland, where a medical association warned that intensive care units are almost saturated.
Limits on movement, commerce and restaurants are not easily accepted everywhere.
In Berlin, German police used water cannons on Wednesday to disperse a demonstration of opponents of the restrictive measures. The protesters said the measures reminded them of the Nazi era and shouted “Shame, shame!”
The protest took place a day after clashes with the police in Bratislava, the Slovak capital, which was attended by far-right protesters.
– Fear in Brazil –
In Brazil, the second country with the most deaths from coronavirus (166,000 deaths) behind the United States, there is an increase in hospitalizations that arouses fears of a second wave such as the one that hits Europe and the United States.
The death rate, which had surpassed 1,000 per day between June and August, fell below 350 at the beginning of last week. But since Saturday it exceeded 500 again.
The state of Sao Paulo, the most populous and with the highest number of cases and deaths, had an 18% rise in hospitalizations last week.
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