"If the patterns we've traced here since spring hold true, the worst is yet to come." — COVID Tracking Project
U.S. COVID update: More than 3,000 new deaths for 2nd day in a row, number in ICU hits 21K.
- New cases: 214,118
- Positivity rate: 11.1% (-0.7)
- In hospital: 107,248 (+560)
- In ICU: 21,021 (+99)
- New deaths: 3,067
- Data: COVID Tracking Project
From The COVID Tracking Project blog:
By nearly all measures it has been a horrible week, a horrible month (nine days in), and a horrible year. The United States set pandemic records in all three metrics that measure the pandemic's severity this week, recording a total of 1.4 million new cases and 15,966 deaths. Yesterday, states and territories reported 3,088 deaths from COVID-19—a record no one wanted to see—and the average number of deaths per day this week exceeded 2,000, surpassing the highest average we saw in the spring's deadly first surge. More than 106,000 people are currently hospitalized with COVID-19.
If the patterns we've traced here since spring hold true, the worst is yet to come. Given the rapid increase in the number of new cases, we expect the metrics for hospitalizations and deaths to continue to rise in the coming weeks—especially if in-person gatherings over Thanksgiving led to increased spread of the novel coronavirus, as public health experts warned.
A crucial bit of muddiness remains in the data itself: Some of the reported deaths we are seeing now are likely related to the post-Thanksgiving backlog we've written so much about in the past month. What's not exactly clear is how many of these deaths are simply following the case increases that occurred before and during the holiday week. Either way, we expect that deaths will climb steeply given current case and hospitalizations numbers. Test reporting, too, is probably still slightly low because of the holiday effect. Case numbers appear to be largely back online following the holiday reporting disruption, however, which makes sense—historically, case numbers have been quicker to recover from holidays and weekends than tests and deaths.
Case numbers were high across the US this week, with each of the country's seven most populous states reporting more than 50,000 new cases among their residents. Fourteen states in regions across the US reported a record number of cases this week; that's on top of the 16 states that hit new-case records last week.
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