A Dreadful New Peak for the American Pandemic

By early September, the pandemic faded to its lowest level since June, with the country reporting only about 34,000 cases a day. Experts warned that the winter months could prove catastrophic, but President Trump took a victory lap. The country was “rounding the final turn” on the pandemic, he announced at a Pennsylvania rally on September 3, a line he echoed at the White House a week later.

In fact, the country was already riding a third wave of infection. By then, cases and hospitalizations were rising in the upper Midwest and Great Plains; North Dakota and Wisconsin busted through their all-time records. Then the Mountain West exploded, and Utah, Montana, and Idaho set new records. Then finally the Northeast, which had been lacerated in the spring, saw cases tick up.

Now the country has reached the 100,000 mark that Fauci predicted. Today, 34 states reported more than 1,000 new cases apiece, forming a single belt of infection from Massachusetts to Nevada. Sixteen states saw a record number of their residents hospitalized with the virus. More than 47,000 Americans have died since Trump’s Pennsylvania rally two months ago.

Today’s six-figure record reflects high levels of infection across the country, including in some of the most populous states. Texas reported 9,600 new cases, with nearly a third coming from El Paso, where hospitals are above capacity. Indiana has set a single-day record with 3,698 new cases. Illinois recorded 7,500 new cases, and its number of hospitalizations increased.

In addition, South Dakota reported—and North Dakota will likely soon report—more hospitalizations per capita than Arizona saw in its summertime surge.

No matter who wins the presidential election, it is virtually guaranteed that the next several months will be among the darkest of the pandemic. Hospitalizations are virtually certain to rise, and cases could spread further if Americans travel for Thanksgiving. And even if a vaccine were to be approved this month, it would likely not be deployed widely enough to bestow protective immunity for most at-risk Americans until well into the new year, Scott Gottlieb, who led the Food and Drug Administration from 2017 to 2019, has said.

The next president will take power in a country where 100,000 cases forms a new baseline. It is November 4, 2020, and the United States is not a healthy country.

Robinson Meyer is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of the newsletter The Weekly Planet, and the co-founder of the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic.

Alexis C. Madrigal is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology.