Corona in the USA: Full hospitals – and worries about children

The declining willingness to vaccinate in the USA is evident in the hospitals. In the south in particular, there are hardly any free intensive care beds, and materials are becoming scarce. And the children’s hospitals are also sounding the alarm.

Michelle Puget’s son died because of corona. Not because he infected himself with the virus. But because all the hospitals in his area were so full of Covid patients that there was no more free intensive care bed for the 46-year-old. This is what his mother told CNN, an elderly lady, close to tears.

The doctors called all hospitals in five states, says Puget – in vain. Her son’s pancreatitis would have been easy to treat. But after hours without the necessary intervention, the man’s organs finally failed. “Every minute he was not given an intensive care bed, he died,” says his mother.

Because around 11,500 people infected with corona have to go to hospital in the USA every day, the health system in some states is completely overloaded. In the southern states of Alabama, Georgia, Texas, Florida and Arkansas, only about ten percent of the intensive care beds are free. And now materials are running out in some places, says Dr Nek Nazary, a doctor in Florida, in an interview with ABC News. “We are afraid that we will soon run out of oxygen in the hospital. We have almost no tests and we already have no more space.”

It mainly affects the unvaccinated

The hospitals are full, especially with unvaccinated patients. Facilities in 40 states reported that those who were fully vaccinated only made up between 0.1 percent and five percent of all cases. A current study by the health authority CDC supports this: The probability of having to go to hospital is 29 times higher for unvaccinated people than for vaccinated people. Top virologist Anthony Fauci repeats: “If we really got the vast majority of 80 million Americans vaccinated, they could see the dynamics of the outbreak change dramatically.”

However, some Americans do not trust the vaccine. They prefer to rely on resources that they have read about on the Internet. For example, ivermectin, a parasite medicine usually given by injection to horses and cows. According to the CDC, it has suddenly been prescribed almost 90,000 times since the beginning of July. According to the CDC, tests related to Covid-19 had not produced any results. “Don’t do it,” recommends Fauci.

Children without protection

The situation is now particularly uncertain for children. It is still true that they are much more mildly ill than adults. Nevertheless, more children and adolescents are currently being treated in hospital in the pandemic than ever before: more than 52,000 in August. Not surprising. The vaccination is only approved in the USA from the age of 12.

And since schoolchildren come together again in classrooms, sometimes without a mask requirement, the delta variant is spreading rapidly: According to the Association of Pediatricians, around 180,000 children tested positive for Corona shortly after school started. Many more are likely to be in quarantine.

Appeal from the hospitals

The Association of Children’s Hospitals has now published a dramatic appeal in the New York Times to anyone who can get vaccinated. In the article, they pointed out the increasing number of Covid cases among adolescents, but also of respiratory diseases, for example due to the RSV pathogen and the persistently high psychological stress on adolescents. The children’s hospitals have reached the limit of their capacity and the health network for children is threatened in unprecedented ways.

After all: the vaccination campaign in the USA is slowly picking up again – perhaps because of the frightening images from overcrowded hospitals. On average, 900,000 people were vaccinated each day recently.