The Week America Lost Control of the Pandemic

Read: America is giving up on the pandemic

These cases aren’t all mild. At least 37,000 Americans are now hospitalized with COVID-19, the same number as were in sick beds in late May. This number is likely a substantial undercount: Florida, which is facing one of the largest outbreaks, does not report its total hospitalization figures, though it says it will publish that data soon. What data we do have suggest that health-care systems are overwhelmed. In Houston, for instance, the Texas Medical Center has filled 100 percent of its intensive-care-unit beds.

The one statistic that has yet to turn in the wrong direction, thankfully, is deaths. National deaths continued to fall this week, averaging fewer than 500 a day. But the pace of their decline has slowed. It’s still too early to know whether deaths will keep decreasing in the next few weeks, but the early signs are not good. There will always be an inherent lag between a rise in coronavirus cases and an associated rise in coronavirus deaths: On average, 14 days pass between someone experiencing the first symptoms and someone dying, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In Arizona, where COVID-19 cases started surging about two weeks ago, deaths have begun to increase. The state reported 267 new deaths in the past week, an all-time high.

This flood of cases is being propelled by outbreaks across the Sun Belt, especially in Arizona, Texas, Florida, and Southern California. Arizona, which confirmed more than 24,000 cases in the past week, now reports more new COVID-19 cases per capita than New York State did at the peak of its outbreak in the spring. Until last week, only New York had ever reported more than 5,000 new cases in a single day; since then, California, Texas, and Florida have all seen several days with more than 5,000 cases. And today, for the first time ever, Florida reported more than 10,000 new cases, another record previously held only by New York. (It’s not clear whether these outbreaks are truly worse than what New York or New Jersey saw in the spring, because access to testing was so restricted then that many sick people never got tested.)

But the outbreak is growing beyond that group. Twenty states have reported record caseloads in the past two weeks, most of them in the past few days. Ten states, mostly in the South, reported more than 1,000 new cases today alone.

Georgia is among the most worrying states right now. This past week, it reported more than 14,800 new cases, thousands more than any previous week, as well as a record number of hospitalizations. This surge in cases cannot be explained by an increase in testing: New cases rose this past week at about twice the rate of tests. COVID-19 cases, in other words, have simply become easier to find in the Peach State: At the beginning of June, about one in 14 tests came back positive. Last week, about one in nine tests did; today, one in seven tests did.