OVEREVIEW: The Pandemic Is in Uncharted Territory

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Sat, 2020-10-31 09:42 — mike kraft

The Pandemic Is in Uncharted Territory The fall surge is rewriting the coronavirus record books across America. And the numbers are still climbing. The COVID Tracking Project The Atlantic

The United States set a new record for reported cases this week, breaking 500,000 for the first time in the pandemic as the third surge continued to build across nearly every state in the country.

Today, the country recorded 88,452 new cases of COVID-19, its highest single-day total since the pandemic began. Over the past two weeks, 25 states have set a new record for cases in the past two weeks, including 17 states with record highs since last Wednesday. ...

These cases are translating into higher numbers of COVID-19 hospitalizations in many states in every region of the country. All but 11 states saw a rise in people hospitalized this week, the largest increases occurring in the upper Midwest and Texas. Although we are not yet close to the hospitalization peaks of almost 60,000 that we observed in the spring and summer, the average number of people hospitalized this week rose to 42,621, a very substantial increase from the lows of about 30,000 that we saw just a month ago.

In some worrying states—North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wisconsin—hospitalization rates are approaching those of the Sun Belt–surge hot spots over the summer. At this point, we see no ev

COVID-19 deaths have risen, but not nearly as sharply as hospitalizations. The current explosion of cases is only three weeks old, and we know from the data that reported deaths lag behind cases and hospitalizations. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the approximate timeline from symptom onset to the reporting of a death to public-health authorities is about three weeks, on average. This lag varies by state, and some states such as Florida take an average of more than six weeks to log COVID-19 deaths. Given the current trends, we should expect deaths to continue to rise in the coming weeks.

More encouraging, as our team explained this week, the fatality rate for hospitalized patients has declined as treatments have improved and younger and healthier people have made up more of those hospitalizations.

It’s important to note, though, that the hardest-hit states are seeing notable increases in deaths. In Wisconsin, the state that led off this surge, deaths rose 56 percent this week and are up 270 percent since the week ending October 1. Deaths have also climbed markedly in the Dakotas to a combined 101 this week, from 11 in the week ending September 3. On a per-capita basis, that is worse than any individual week of deaths in Florida at any time in the pandemic. ...

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