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National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins warned on Sunday the continuing rise of Covid-19 cases propelled by the Delta variant could return the nation to the worst days of the pandemic. “This is going very steeply upward with no signs of having peaked out,” Collins said on “Fox News Sunday.” (Kim, 8/15)

The United States accounts for more than one-fifth of the world's total COVID-19 cases for the first time since mid-February, before vaccines were widely available, a USA TODAY analysis of Johns Hopkins University data shows. The country reported more than 900,000 cases in a week for the first time since the week ending Feb. 4, while deaths surpassed 4,500 a week, nearly triple the count during the last lull. Cases were rising in 46 states. Florida, Hawaii, Louisiana and Mississippi broke all-time case count highs last week, based on data reported Friday. Friday's tallies broke community-level records, too, including those of 32 Florida counties, 32 Mississippi counties, 12 Louisiana parishes and 10 Oregon counties. They also broke records in four of five Hawaii counties. Hawaii's other county is secluded and has about 100 residents. (Santucci and Bacon, 8/15)

Baylor College of Medicine didn’t intend for its new-student orientation to become a case study in breakthrough infections. In retrospect, the photographed smiles and cheery video on Baylor’s Facebook page, look ominous. On Monday, July 26, around 200 people — mainly first-year medical students wearing hot-pink theme-weekend T-shirts — gathered inside a Baylor building and loaded plates from a breakfast buffet. They weren’t socially distanced, and in the photos, the only masks visible are in people’s hands or dangle from their wrists. (Gray, 8/14)

Los Angeles County officials on Sunday continued to report a surge in coronavirus cases as schools prepared to open. The Department of Public Health on Sunday recorded 3,356 new cases of the virus and eight related deaths but said the real number is likely higher due to weekend reporting delays. There were 1,653 COVID-19 patients in county hospitals as of Saturday, an increase of nearly 51% from two weeks before, when there were 1,096 patients. (Wigglesworth, 8/15)

National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins on Sunday played down undocumented immigrants as a major factor in the U.S. coronavirus pandemic, calling such suggestions a “distraction.” “It's an issue, but it is certainly not the cause of our current dilemma,” Collins said on “Fox News Sunday.” (Kim, 8/15)

At the very end of a Stanford panel about coronavirus variants last week, someone finally posed the question that seems to haunt everyone now: Just how much worse than the highly infectious delta variant can this virus get? The answers were both cautiously reassuring and disconcertingly unsatisfying. The “doomsday scenario,” in which a variant is completely resistant to antibodies and remains highly transmissible, is unlikely, said Arjun Rustagi, an infectious disease fellow at Stanford. But beyond that, many experts were wary about guessing.“ This virus has a massive genome. There’s still room for it to play, and it’s really hard to make predictions on where it’s going to go,” Dr. Catherine Blish, an infectious disease expert and Rustagi’s mentor, said Wednesday during Stanford grand rounds, an educational panel for medical students and physicians. (Allday, 8/13)

KHN: ‘I Don’t Want To Risk My Life For A Paycheck’: Immunosuppressed People Grapple With Returning To Work

Elizabeth Groenweghe got a kidney transplant 14 years ago. She now takes several medications to prevent her body from rejecting her transplant organ. But these medications also weaken her immune system, putting her at higher risk of becoming seriously ill if she catches covid-19. When the pandemic began last year, Groenweghe, 29, worked from home for the first month and a half. But then in May 2020, as the chief epidemiologist for the public health department in Wyandotte County, Kansas, she returned to the office. “Obviously, I was nervous about it because I’m so immunosuppressed,” said Groenweghe. (Knight, 8/13)

More than 1 in 10 COVID-19 patients from 314 UK hospitals acquired their infection from the hospital early in the pandemic, according to a research letter in The Lancet yesterday. "There are likely to be a number of reasons why many patients were infected in these care settings," said study author Chris A. Green, MBBS, DPhil, in a Lancaster University press release. (McLernon, 8/13)

COVID-19 transmission among households was three times more likely if the household had a high living density, according to a study yesterday in Clinical Infectious Diseases. Higher living density is defined as having more than three household members but fewer than six rooms. (8/13)