Behind Every Mask

New COVID cases and hospitalizations are exploding across the United States as the pandemic has reached a crescendo, accelerating across dozens of states in both sparsely populated rural areas and densely populated urban centers. “We are entering the most difficult phase of the pandemic right now,” former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb said last week. “We are much better prepared to deal with it, but it is going to be a hard stretch ahead.”

New cases have skyrocketed to record levels of up to 600,000 per week, and hospitalizations are up 50% over just a month ago. Testing levels are high, averaging more than one million per day, but the percentage of tests coming back positive has also risen, to about 5.3% as of this writing. That means we may be catching more cases — but there are also more cases to catch.

And more than 230,000 Americans lie dead, with 900–1,000 more people dying on most days.

There is, baruch Hashem, much good news too. Most importantly, that treatment for the virus continues to improve at a galloping clip, due to advancements in treatments and hospitals’ ability to better deal with patients. According to new research, hospitalized COVID patients have approximately a 7.6% chance of dying, a vast improvement over several months ago, albeit still many times higher than the chance of death from the flu and other infections (and survivors may find that the virus has caused serious long-term damage to critical organs).