Zana Cooper received a piece of news that caused her “a lot of anger” the Sunday after Thanksgiving: she had tested positive for COVID-19.
A few days earlier, he participated in a dinner with the family of his son's girlfriend.
After getting sick, she
has had a fever, headache, and in recent days it has become more difficult to breathe
.
A doctor determined that her daughter and two grandchildren, who live with her in California, are also infected.
Since that holiday at the end of November, the United States has registered new records of confirmed cases in 24 hours, while many hospitals in the country are experiencing a situation of collapse or are close to overflowing due to the admission of patients with coronavirus.
During the past 19 days, more than 35,000 people died after becoming ill
, according to our sister network NBC News.
Across the country, contact trackers and ER doctors are repeatedly hearing from new coronavirus patients who socialized over Thanksgiving with people outside of their homes.
This occurred despite emphatic warnings from public health officials about the need to stay at home and take other precautions to avoid outbreaks, as the situation was already serious.
A woman is hospitalized on December 4 in Manhattan, New York, as the country experiences a wave of COVID-19 infections and many medical centers are overflowing.
REUTERS / REUTERS
"It's an increase on top of the current increase," Ali Mokdad, professor of health metrics sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle, told The Associated Press news agency.
"It's honestly a warning sign for all of us," he
adds.
The consequences of this possible explosive cocktail of risk situations for the spread of the virus (
meetings of several people from different families, trips, celebrations in closed spaces
...) has yet to be fully calculated.
Darlene Smith, director of Public Health for Steuben County, New York, explains for example that it is still unknown how many more people who tested positive after the holidays and how many will eventually need a bed in intensive care is still unknown.
"It's a domino effect," he says.
One of these cases is that of the Harry and Ashley Neidig families of Shepherdstown, West Virginia.
They both tested positive for COVID-19 last week.
They believe that they were infected at work, but then they celebrated Thanksgiving with family members of both,
without knowing yet about their exposure to the coronavirus
.
After testing positive, they warned the people they came in contact with.
Some were still awaiting test results when the couple told the AP about their case this week.
Due to the situation, hospitals in various areas of the country are under extreme pressure, for example in Mississippi or in the San Joaquin Valley in California,
where this Saturday there was no longer a single intensive care bed available
.
Health authorities defend emergency approval of the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine
Dec. 12, 202002: 55
In such a state of affairs, more and more health workers feel exhausted and demoralized.
"I am there every day";
pulmonologist Eyad Almasri, who works in Fresno, California, told the Los Angeles Times, "I've seen people die."
And at the same time, many people find themselves in too fragile an economic situation to be able to safely assume the restrictions imposed by the authorities in a desperate attempt to contain the infections.
"At the beginning of the year we had no debt.
Now we owe $ 300,000
," Dino Ballin, owner of a hairdresser in that state, told the same newspaper.
But the hardest is not over yet, and the upcoming festivities planned this month may make the situation even worse if measures are not taken that will make the celebrations this year have little to do with the usual ones, experts warn.
"This is not the time to invite the neighbors to dinner. This is not the time to start celebrating parties,"
warns Joshua LaBaer, a researcher at Arizona State University.
Meanwhile, the United States is already engaged in the largest vaccination effort in its history to try to end as soon as possible a pandemic that has already claimed the lives of almost 300,000 people in less than a year.
With information from AP, NBC News, LA Times, Clarion Ledger.