"At a breaking point': New surge of Covid-19 cases has states, hospitals scrambling, yet again
Stat News
By ANDREW JOSEPH @DrewQJoseph OCTOBER 20, 2020
Here we go again.
As hospitalizations for Covid-19 inch up around the country, some states are readying plans for field hospitals. Communities are delaying reopening plans and even imposing new measures, though some governors remain opposed to additional restrictions. Deaths — currently standing about 220,000 — have not surged again yet, but that might just be a matter of time.
The current rise in coronavirus cases around the U.S. is reminiscent of the summer crest, and has flashbacks to the emergence of the national crisis in the spring. There are attempts to characterize what’s happening — a third wave or a third peak of a single wave that never fully ebbed — but whatever your semantic preference, cases are racing up in many states and breaking daily records in the Midwest and Mountain West. They’re even creeping up in places that experienced the brunt of the earlier outbreaks, like Massachusetts and New York.
“We thought it was horrible then, but when you look at it from this perspective, they were fairly low,” said Kimberley Shoaf, an expert in public health crises at the University of Utah, reflecting on her state’s caseload in the spring. Now, for the first time, Utah is consistently seeing more than 1,000 new daily infections, according to STAT’s Covid-19 Tracker.
“Our health care system is almost at a breaking point,” Shoaf said.
More here
https://www.statnews.com/2020/10/20/at-a-breaking-point-new-surge-of-covid-19-cases-has-states-hospitals-scrambling-yet-again/
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