A year after 1st jabs, earlier pandemic hallmarks back in US

TAOS (New Mexico) • Nearly a year after Covid-19 vaccines were first administered in the United States, the country is returning to many of the hallmarks that defined earlier pandemic life: mask mandates, mass vaccination sites, crowded hospitals and a rising death toll.

Amid hope that humanity would soon get the upper hand on the coronavirus, New York City intensive care unit (ICU) nurse Sandra Lindsay received a dose of Pfizer's just-approved vaccine on Dec 14 last year, becoming the first US resident to be inoculated.

Since then, more than 200 million others - more than 60 per cent of the US population - have had at least two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines, or one of Johnson & Johnson's single-shot inoculation, according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

Despite that triumph of modern science, the country's death toll continues to mount. Since the first jab, nearly 500,000 more people have died of Covid-19, with the country expected to cross the 800,000 mark next week, according to a Reuters tally.

Both infections - approaching 50 million since the start of the pandemic - and deaths have been rising in recent weeks, especially as colder weather in northern states pushes activities indoors, allowing for easier virus transmission.

Resurgent infections on Friday prompted New York Governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, to temporarily reimpose a requirement for face coverings inside businesses and venues that do not require proof of vaccination.

"We shouldn't have reached the point where we are confronted with a winter surge, especially with the vaccine at our disposal, and I share many New Yorkers' frustration that we are not past this pandemic yet," she said in a statement.

Mask mandates, which Republican governors mostly eschewed as government overreach, were a common infection prevention tool for many Democratic governors during the pandemic's worst surge, which began during the year-end holiday season of 2020.

Battling the virus has been complicated by its more aggressive mutations, including the currently dominant Delta variant and fast-spreading Omicron, which was first identified last month and has already been detected in nearly half of the 50 states.

The politicisation of vaccines and hesitancy of many Americans to get jabbed has also helped keep the pandemic going, usually with more deadly results, experts said.

In New Mexico, hospitals are reaching record capacity levels as unvaccinated patients fill ICUs. In one of the state's hardest-hit hospitals in San Juan County, critical care beds filled up as fast as patients were discharged or died.

Dr Erin Philpott of San Juan Regional Medical Centre said eight of her patients, most of them unvaccinated, died in the week before last.

"It's sometimes hard to even feel because it's so much and it's constant," she said. "You can see the rooms fill up right after, and you don't have a second to pause and just process all this loss."

New Mexico's acting health secretary David Scrase said: "The fuel for this fire, our case counts, is unvaccinated individuals. Our hospitals are in a really grave situation."

Three out of four Covid-19 patients in the state are unvaccinated, officials said.

The same is true for Michigan, which is dealing with one of the nation's worst outbreaks.

In Connecticut, health officials this week said unvaccinated people are five times more likely to get infected, 12 times more likely to be hospitalised and 16 times more likely to die.

Shortly after the Omicron variant was detected in New Jersey, Governor Phil Murphy this week reopened one of the state's previously shuttered mass vaccination sites in an effort to encourage residents to get booster shots.

Most of the large vaccination sites that states opened early this year to speed up inoculations have closed.

Another symbol of the early pandemic, the contaminated cruise ship, also re-emerged this week.

Last Monday, Norwegian Cruise Line said a South African crew member suspected of being infected with the Omicron variant was among 17 Covid-19 cases detected on a ship that disembarked in New Orleans over the weekend.

REUTERS