CORONAVIRUS Omicron explosion causes outages of basic services across the country – Topky.sk

The New York Times (NYT) reports that dozens of hospitals in New York State have to postpone planned procedures. The number of newly detected diseases in the USA has been rising sharply since mid-December and has been well above last year’s highs for several days now. Compared to previous waves, a significantly smaller proportion of those infected in hospital beds seem to end up, but the pressure on healthcare is enormous during the outbreak of infections. Not only hospitals then suffer from personnel problems due to the isolation of infected workers.

“Ambulances in Kansas are moving toward hospitals, but suddenly change direction because hospitals are full. Lack of staff in New York City is delaying waste collection in the subway and weakening firefighters and other emergency services. Airport management has closed security checks at most terminals in Phoenix and schools across the country find it difficult to find teachers in their classrooms. “ summarizes current AP issues.

According to her, schools, hospitals and various other bodies are trying to maintain their operations by all possible means, but they are concerned about the sustainability of the current situation. For example, ambulance crews in Johnson County, Kansas, now reportedly work 80 hours a week. It is not clear when the current wave of the American epidemic will peak. Rochelle Walenska, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said on Friday that this had not yet happened.

Source: TASR / AP / Jim Lo Scalzo / Pool

The worst hit is New York

One of the worst affected states is currently 19 million New York, where more than 10,000 coronavirus patients are hospitalized. According to the NYT, the regional government expanded the list of hospitals that must interrupt non-urgent care for at least two weeks on Saturday, with 40 medical facilities after the adjustment. None of them are in New York City.

A total of 138,000 coronavirus people were in U.S. hospitals on Saturday, according to The Washington Post. The balance of hospitalizations thus reached the level of the worst phase of the previous winter wave of the epidemic. At the same time, many patients for whom covid-19 is not the cause of hospitalization are included in the sum. Some hospitals report that “side coid” cases account for about half of all patients who test positive for SARS-CoV-2.

Source: SITA / AP Photo / Kathy Willens

Healthcare utilization is likely to increase further in the coming days, as the rise in daily infections has not yet ended. However, the chart on the NYT website shows that it slowed down by the end of the week. According to the daily, the average increase from the last week after Saturday was almost 660,000 infections per day.

We have to reduce the sheer volume of infections

Using public health approaches like more testing, avoiding indoor crowds, and more indoor mask wearing

I remain very worried about our hospitals’ ability to care for everyone who needs care over next 6 weeks

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– Ashish K. Jha, MD, MPH (@ashishkjha) January 8, 2022

“We need to reduce the huge volume of infections,” wrote the Dean of the Faculty of Public Health at Brown University Ashish Jha on Twitter. According to him, the link between infections and hospitalizations is much weaker in the spread of omicron than before, but health care is in trouble. “I remain very concerned about the ability of our hospitals to take care of all those in need in the next six weeks.” said Jha. The United States has reported 835,000 covidom-19 deaths since the start of the pandemic. The daily numbers are also currently rising, with about 1,500 deaths in each of the last seven days.