【Text/Observer Network Liu Qian】
"We've never seen this before, even at the peak of the COVID-19 outbreak before (it wasn't so bad)." James Phillips, an American health expert, lamented.
CNN reported on December 30 that the Omiljung strain has ravaged the United States, causing an unprecedented surge in cases and hospitals across the country are being crushed. According to the statistics of Johns Hopkins University, from 6:22 Beijing time on the 28th to 6:22 on the 31st, a total of 3 days, the new confirmed cases in the United States reached a staggering 1.62 million. Over the past week, the U.S. has set a new record high of an average of more than 300,000 new cases per day (300886).
Among them, in the past 24 hours as of 6:22 Beijing time on December 31, 2021, Johns Hopkins University recorded 618094 new confirmed cases in a single day in the United States, another record, similar to the 647061 cases recorded by Bloomberg. The British "Independent" also counted that the United States added more than 600,000 cases in a single day.
Bloomberg data
Screenshot of the Independent report
The New York Times, which uses different time nodes to count single-day cases, also recorded more than 580,000 new cases in the United States in 24 hours. That being the case, in the New York Times database, the United States is still "breaking the record it has created."
Screenshot of CNN's report on the 30th
In addition, infections among children in the United States are increasingly serious. Reuters quoted data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on the 30th that the number of children hospitalized due to the new crown in the country surged by 58% last week. Currently, the vaccination rate of the population under the age of 18 in the United States is less than 25%. Some scholars in the United States have questioned whether the mRNA vaccine may cause "permanent damage" to children.
Marked in red for highly contagious areas and blue for low-contagious areas, CNN reported screenshot
The hospital is overcrowded
James Phelps is the head of the Department of Disaster Medicine at George Washington University Hospital. He said all emergency rooms in Washington are now overcrowded because of the surge in cases caused by Omicron. CNN reported that from New Jersey and New York to Kansas and Chicago, similar scenes were staged all over the United States at the same time.
In Georgia, the state's six major health systems have seen a recent 100-200 percent increase in COVID-19 hospitalizations, and most patients are unvaccinated.
In Louisiana, COVID-19 hospitalizations have tripled in the past two weeks, setting a new record. Dr Catherine O'Neal, a state health specialist, called the increase in hospitalizations "alarming," with many cases unvaccinated and often suffering from severe pneumonia and requiring intubation or inhalation of high-flow oxygen.
According to the statistics of Johns Hopkins University in the United States, as of 6:22 Beijing time on December 31, 2021, the cumulative number of confirmed cases of new crown pneumonia in the United States reached 54215085, and the cumulative number of deaths reached 824135. In the past three days, the number of new confirmed cases in the United States has exceeded 160,000, reaching 1621471.
Previously, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released data on the 28th that the past week's Aumechjong strain infection cases accounted for 58.6% of all new confirmed cases in the country. A CDC spokesperson said there is a lot of uncertainty in the estimated data, up to 95 percent. Just three weeks ago, that percentage was 0.6 percent.
Hospitalization rates for children increased by 58% from last week
It is worth noting that in this surge in cases, the situation of children in the United States is particularly not optimistic.
On November 3, 2021, local time, Connecticut, USA, children were vaccinated against Pfizer against the new crown. The picture is from the surging image
Reuters quoted data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the 30th that the average daily hospitalization of children in the United States from December 21 to 27 was 334 cases, an increase of 58% over last week.
New York City had only 22 hospitalized cases aged 18 and under earlier this month, and by December 19-23, the number of hospitalizations aged 18 and under had grown to 109, with nearly half of those cases still under the age of 5.
There has also been a surge in child cases in other parts of the U.S., where hospitalizations for children ages 17 and younger have increased by 125% in the past 4 weeks in Ohio. CDC data shows that the average 7-day hospitalization of cases aged 18 and under in Florida, New Jersey and Illinois has at least doubled.
Screenshot of the Reuters report
The surge in cases in the child population is associated with low vaccination rates. Reuters quoted CDC data as saying that there are about 74 million people aged 18 and under in the United States, and less than 25% of them have been vaccinated. In contrast, 61.9 percent of the total U.S. population is fully vaccinated.
According to Rochelle Walensky, the head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, unvaccinated people have a 10-fold higher risk of infection and a 20-fold higher risk of death than vaccinated people.
However, the United States has not yet authorized the vaccination of children under 5 years of age, and many Americans are reluctant to vaccinate their children in other age groups where vaccines are authorized. Reuters said that since the Pfizer vaccine was authorized for children aged 5 to 11 years on October 29, only 15% of children in this age group are currently fully vaccinated.
At present, some people in the United States still have concerns about the safety of mRNA vaccines. According to reports, one of the main contributors to mRNA vaccine technology, Robert Malone, an American doctor and infectious disease researcher, recently posted a video on Twitter about "mRNA vaccine causes permanent damage to children", which caused heated discussions on multiple social platforms.
Subsequently, Robert Malone's account was "permanently frozen" by Twitter officials for violating the Twitter community's policy on "spreading misleading and potentially harmful information related to the COVID-19 pandemic."
Robert Malone's Twitter account was permanently suspended
According to Agence France-Presse, Deborah Greenhouse, a fellow at the American Academy of Pediatrics, believes ThatRon's views in the video are "misleading and frankly dangerous and wrong." "There is absolutely no evidence that the spike protein produced by the mRNA vaccine is toxic," she said.
This article is an exclusive manuscript of the Observer Network and may not be reproduced without authorization.