Omicron strains hospitals across US

The Omicron variant is putting enormous strain on hospitals across the United States, exhausting nurses and doctors, filling up beds and halting elective surgeries at many hospitals, as the country reported another record high of daily infections on Monday.

At least 1.13 million cases were reported on Monday, the highest daily total of any country in the world, according to a Reuters tally.

COVID-19 hospitalizations also reached a record high on Monday.

There were 132,646 people hospitalized with COVID-19, surpassing last January's record of 132,051.

"The deaths that are being reported as COVID-19 deaths greatly understate the actual death losses among working-age people from the pandemic," Scott Davison, CEO of mutual insurance holding company OneAmerica, was quoted by The Guardian as saying.

Washington DC led the nation in new infections based on population in the past week, followed by Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Vermont.

Further compounding the healthcare strain is the dual surge of Omicron and Delta in some parts of the country. Hospitalizations for COVID-19 patients in New York City have passed the peak of last winter's surge.

Doctors said the challenges hospitals face now are less about stockpiling equipment and more about staffing and contagion, reported The New York Times.

"Early on in the pandemic, we were worried about running out of things like ventilators," Ryan Maves, an infectious disease and critical care physician at the Wake Forest School of Medicine in North Carolina, told the Times. "Now, the real limitations are obviously physical bed space, but even more so, it's staffing."

'Very tiring'

Robert Glasgow from the University of Utah Health, which has hundreds of workers out sick or in isolation, told The Associated Press that this is getting "very tiring".

Adam Blackstone, vice-president of external affairs and strategic communications for the Hospital Association of Southern California, told China Daily that the most significant challenge to hospitals in the nation's most populous state dealing with the rapid increase in hospitalizations is the availability of healthcare professionals to care for patients, instead of physical space.

On Monday, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said he has COVID-19 for a second time and was experiencing mild symptoms, as the hard-hit country battles another wave of infections.

Across the Atlantic, the European Union ended travel restrictions on flights from southern Africa on Monday, well over a month after imposing them in hopes of containing the spread of Omicron.

Agencies and Xinhua contributed to this story.