Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
'It Is A Really Dangerous Time': Most States Battling Rapid COVID Surge
In Ohio, more people are hospitalized with the coronavirus than at any other time during the pandemic. North Dakota, which is leading the nation in coronavirus cases per capita, reported more than 1,000 cases on Tuesday, the state’s worst daily total yet. And as of Monday, 16 states had added more cases in the prior week than in any other seven-day stretch. After weeks of spread and warnings in certain areas, a third surge of coronavirus infections has now firmly taken hold across much of the United States. (Mervosh and Tompkins, 10/21)
A leading health expert says US Covid-19 cases will begin to rapidly accelerate in a week as the country topped 60,000 new infections Tuesday -- triple what the daily average was back in June, when restrictions had begun to ease. The prediction comes after several state leaders reimposed some measures to help curb the spread of the virus, fueled by small gatherings increasingly moving indoors with the colder weather, as well as other factors such as college and school reopenings. (Maxouris, 10/21)
COVID-19 has spread lethally, yet unevenly through all 50 states. One way to measure the level of infections is hospitalizations. Here’s how hospitalizations in the US have changed over time, state by state, since March 1, 2020. (Hancock and Ciras, 10/21)
Republican governors are pleading for basic public health precautions as their states face a new wave of coronavirus cases, even as President Donald Trump downplays the pandemic’s severity and tells people to move on with their lives. The clashing messages come as large swaths of the country experience uncontrolled spread that state officials fear could swamp their already strapped health systems. They’re putting out calls for volunteers to help staff hospitals, placing new limits on public gatherings and urging, or in some cases mandating, the wearing of masks. (Goldberg and Ollstein, 10/21)
Two new peer-reviewed studies are showing a sharp drop in mortality among hospitalized COVID-19 patients. The drop is seen in all groups, including older patients and those with underlying conditions, suggesting that physicians are getting better at helping patients survive their illness. "We find that the death rate has gone down substantially," says Leora Horwitz, a doctor who studies population health at New York University's Grossman School of Medicine and an author on one of the studies, which looked at thousands of patients from March to August. (Brumfiel, 10/20)
