Via the blog of The COVID Tracking Project: A Nationwide Case Surge Hits US Hospitals: This Week in COVID-19 Data, Nov 12. Click through for the full report with many graphs. Excerpt:
This week, the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States accelerated again, driving record numbers of cases and hospitalizations as healthcare systems around the country warned that they are approaching a breaking point. Cases are up 41 percent, hospitalizations up 20 percent, and deaths up 23 percent. States reported 875,401 new cases this week; 1 in 378 Americans tested positive for COVID-19 this week.
The seven-day average of deaths now exceeds 1,000 per day, a level not seen since the summer surge. States reported another 7,382 lives lost to COVID-19 in the past week.
The number of people who are hospitalized with COVID-19 in the United States has nearly doubled in the past two weeks, and hospitalizations increased in 47 states. As project co-leaders Erin Kissane and Alexis Madrigal wrote on our site and in The Atlantic earlier this week, the dangerous spike in hospitalizations suggests that further increases in the number of fatalities are imminent. Twenty-seven states this week hit a record for the number of new cases reported.
Once again, our metrics reveal a pattern: Cases lead to hospitalizations lead to deaths. The current national case surge has been underway for nine weeks, hospitalizations have risen for seven weeks, and deaths have risen for five. Testing is up 13 percent this week, but as we have written many times, this testing increase, while important, cannot account for a 41 percent increase in cases. Because of substantial inconsistencies in the way states and territories report their COVID-19 tests, we do not calculate test positivity from the public data we can compile. But according to the White House Task Force—which has access to federal reporting pipelines—20 states now have a test positivity rate of more than 10 percent, with many counties at more than 20 percent test positivity.
Although we have seen cases (and hospitalizations and deaths) spike twice before in the United States, several things about this moment in the pandemic are new: Daily new cases are now nearly twice as high as they were in the Sunbelt surge this summer.
Hospitalizations have broken the previous national record and are rising very quickly in every US region—something we’ve never seen before.
In fact, hospitalizations are now rising more quickly than we’ve ever seen outside of a brief period in late March. The past three days have seen increases larger than any single day since mid-April.
Where the virus is hitting hardest
For weeks, the states of the upper Midwest have been the most hard-hit, per capita, by COVID-19; now major increases in deaths are following. Kansas now leads the nation in per-capita cases, with North Dakota, South Dakota, Wisconsin, and Iowa close behind. And the death toll—a metric known to lag cases by about three weeks—is already worsening in every one of the region’s 12 states.
