USA Joe Biden declares Texas a catastrophic zone due to the cold wave
USA Gavin Newsom, before a political ultimatum for his management of the pandemic in California
Santa Clara County corresponds to what is known as Silicon Valley.
It is a landscape of hills and forests that is quite reminiscent of the province of Lugo
, especially the north, and of coastal towns with beaches from which it is possible to see gray whales and, if we are lucky, even white sharks that, despite what that Spielberg told us, they don't eat anyone, because they are looking for sea lions - although for most people they are simply seals - that are often quietly on the beaches, on the docks or in the dikes containment of the waves.
The capital, San José,
is indistinguishable from any other American city
.
Nobody would say that there you are three quarters of an hour by car from the mythical San Francisco, or that on the outskirts of that urban center is
one of the most important universities in the world, Stanford
, the gigantic headquarters of Alphabet, the owner of Google, or the futuristic 'donut' building that is the headquarters of the richest company in the world, Apple.
There, somewhere in Santa Clara County, on February 6 of last year, a 57-year-old woman died,
having had an illness with flu-like symptoms
.
He was not a person with serious health risks.
He was overweight and had certain heart problems.
But he was, according to medical authorities,
in good health
.
The autopsy revealed that he had a virus called Covid-19 in his trachea, intestine, lungs and heart.
The virus caused an accumulation of blood in the pericardium, the membrane that surrounds the heart, which caused that organ to fail.
The death of February 6 was not disclosed,
despite the fact that the autopsy clearly specified the cause of death
.
For several weeks, American public opinion thought that the first person to die from the coronavirus had been a fifty-something-year-old man in the city of Seattle, 1,350 kilometers north, on the 29th of the same month.
It was an investigation by the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper that discovered the death of that woman, whose name has not been made public.
A year, two weeks and a day later, the
United States
prepares to register the 500,000th death from Covid-19
, although the actual number of deaths far exceeds 700,000, according to estimates by the health authorities themselves.
In reality, as in the case of the first deceased, there is no precise figure.
The most commonly accepted measure, from Johns Hopkins University, was close to that number yesterday.
The one on the NBC television network had reached him on Sunday afternoon.
What started as a footnote has become a turning point in the history of the country.
Only in the first five months since the death of the Santa Clara woman,
Average life expectancy in the country plummeted by one year
, in what is the largest decline since World War II.
Although the victims tend to be people with lower income levels, the virus has shown that, politically, it does not make distinctions.
That becomes clear when you adjust deaths to the population, as the RealClearPolitics website has done.
Of the 10 states that have had the most deaths per 1,000 inhabitants, five are Democrats, four are Republicans, and another - Arizona - is divided between both parties.
Of the ten who have been least affected by the pandemic,
eight are Democrats, and two are Republicans.
Covid-19 kills alike,
despite the fact that citizens and political leaders have insisted on giving it an ideological bias
.
You know you are in a Republican area when you see many people without masks, or you find signs at the entrance of the supermarket saying that 'By order of authority, we are forced to require customers to wear masks.
We apologize for the inconvenience. '
And he knows he's in a place where Democrats win when someone yells at him in the middle of the street
'Put on your mask!'
Wearing a mask or not is a declaration of principles as serious as putting on a red cap with the letters MAGA, that is, 'Make America Great Again', is Donald Trump's slogan.
In the US
, around 2,500 people
still die
a day from Covid-19 today
, although that is a figure 40% lower than that of the worst moments of the pandemic, a month ago.
The immunization program is progressing very quickly - certainly much more than in Europe - and 7.4% of the population have already received one dose of the vaccine, while another 5.9% already have both injections.
This Friday a third vaccine is expected to be approved,
this time from Johnson & Johnson, which will only require one dose
.
Those are the signs of light at the end of a tunnel that the United States entered that February 6, 2020 in Santa Clara.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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