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The latest U.S. Covid surge isn’t confined to certain regions like the ones in the spring and summer. It’s hitting the whole nation hard. Hospitalizations reached 70,000 this week, with more than 13,000 patients in intensive-care units. Health systems in communities like Minot, N.D., and El Paso, Texas, are overburdened, and others may be in the same position soon if governors don’t work quickly and across state lines to slow the spread. (Scott Gottlieb and Mark McClellan, 11/15)

On Sunday’s episode of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” host Chuck Todd gave his audience a peek behind the booking curtain. Discussing President Trump’s nonsensical claims of a stolen election, Todd told viewers, “We invited every single Republican senator to appear on ‘Meet the Press’ this morning. They all declined.” Even as most Republicans indulge the president’s fantasies of victory, they’re too cowardly — or too embarrassed — to actually defend Trump’s conspiracy theories. But there’s another reason Republicans are avoiding the press: to duck answering for the president’s — and their party’s — dawdling while the coronavirus again overwhelms the country. The third wave of covid-19 is here, and the numbers are truly grim. (James Downie, 11/15)

John Maynard Keynes once famously observed that there’s nothing as disastrous as a rational investment policy in an irrational world. But when it comes to public health, rational policies make sense even in an irrational or chaotic time like the midst of a severe pandemic. (Elliott J. Millenson and William A. Haseltine, 11/16)

President Donald Trump is facing a barrage of calls to permit potentially life-saving transition talks between his health officials and incoming President-elect Joe Biden's aides on a fast-worsening pandemic he is continuing to ignore in his obsessive effort to discredit an election that he clearly lost. The increasingly urgent pleas are coming from inside his administration, the President-elect's team and independent public health experts as Covid-19 cases rage out of control countrywide, claiming more than 1,000 US lives a day. More than 246,000 Americans have now died from the disease. (Stephen Collinson, 11/16)

No methoid of blocking the spread of the coronavirus is perfect, but many of them are good. The use of cloth face masks is not a guarantee against broadcasting or receiving the virus, but when combined with other measures such as hand-washing and distancing, it can sharply reduce the spread. That’s why it is entirely wrongheaded for some Republican governors to resist the face mask mandates that President-elect Joe Biden has urged. Thirty-four states and the District have mandated face coverings in public; as the pandemic dangerously escalates, the others should join them. (11/13)

I don't judge someone by whom they vote for, what team they cheer for or how they like their steak cooked. But few things make me lose respect for a person faster than learning they're an anti-masker. I have not arrived at this opinion lightly; as I write this, my home state of Utah just shattered a record by reporting 3,919 new cases of Covid-19. (Daryl Austin, 11/13)

What over eight months of navigating the novel coronavirus pandemic has taught us is that a mask is one of the most valuable tools currently available to mitigate the spread of the virus. A recent report produced by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington found that if 95% of Americans wore masks, we could save nearly 70,000 lives that would otherwise be lost to Covid-19 by March 1. (Susan Blumenthal and Emily Stark, 11/16)

About this time a year ago, the earliest known Chinese patients were exposed to a new mutation of the SARS coronavirus. By December, enough of them had been hospitalized in the city of Wuhan to attract the attention of local health authorities. By the following month, the new virus was so widespread that the entire city of 11 million on the banks of the great Yangtze River was locked down in quarantine. In the space of a single year, the novel virus has spread through most of the world, producing more than 53 million identified cases of the multi-symptom disease known as covid-19. At least 1.3 million deaths, including at least 242,000 in the United States alone, have been attributed to the pandemic, which has battered the global economy, disrupted daily life and arguably brought an end to an American presidency. (11/13)

This is where we are: The first state to top 1 million coronavirus cases since the pandemic began. A COVID death toll of more than 19,000 Texans, enough people to fill the AT&T Center where the San Antonio Spurs play. Turning things around is imperative. Experts have warned for months that this winter could bring the worst of the coronavirus pandemic, and still Texas is headed in the wrong direction. COVID fatigue runs thick, and our state leaders have failed for months to provide the clear, science-driven leadership this crisis demands. But there are critical actions we can all take to help curb the spread. Wear a mask. Practice social distancing. Avoid group gatherings. We recognize Texans are tiring of these measures and the strain of a sequestered existence. But your health, even your life or the life of a family member or someone you know, could depend on such efforts over the next few months, until a vaccine becomes widely available. (11/15)

Nobody should begrudge the Governor for celebrating a birthday with friends. The problem is that he and many politicians require the hoi polloi to follow strict virus rules that they don’t abide by themselves. Then they threaten lockdowns as punishment if the little people don’t comply. Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser traveled to Delaware to celebrate Joe Biden’s election victory even as she told her residents not to travel to other states. Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot is saying that people must “cancel traditional Thanksgiving plans,” and invite no guests, even as she joined a street party celebrating Mr. Biden’s apparent victory and spoke with a bullhorn. No wonder so many Americans ignore politicians and other elites who lecture them about wearing masks and following Covid-19 rules as a moral duty. (11/15)