I think we can say with little hesitation that for the last three weeks every day has been worse than the last. Today looks especially bad. The headline is that we now have the most COVID-19 cases in the world. That is of course a symbolic milestone. Underneath that headline are very bad numbers.
The US added almost twenty-thousand new cases today (19,732). That is very close to double the biggest day so far. A bunch of that is accelerated testing. There were 113,056 new tests taken in the last day in the United States. The highest until now was 65,840 on Monday. But the most harrowing number was a big, big jump today in hospitalizations. Up today to 6844 from 3805 the day before.
Here’s the chart of total hospitalizations by day. Again, this isn’t new cases each day but totals.
You can see the scope of the jump.
President Trump’s press conference today was filled with all the same lies and bizarre claims. But he looked like someone who’d had the wind knocked out of him. I suspect they’d reviewed these numbers before they spoke.
Across the country we’re seeing comparable acceleration, albeit days or a weeks behind New York. We’re in the storm.
