Our daily update is published. States reported 1.4M new tests and 144k cases, another all-time high. 65.4k people are hospitalized, 15k more than on election day. The death toll was 1,421, pushing the 7-day average over 1,000.
On a per capita basis, more people are now dying across the Midwest than even at the peak of the summer surge in the South.
Hospitalizations are now rising very quickly. The last three days standout, but across all of November, we’re averaging 1,636 more current hospitalizations each day.
38 states reported over 1,000 cases today.
*Today’s #Covid19 Update Thread* (tests, cases, deaths, hospitalizations, ICU, and % testing positive as of Today, 1 week, 2 weeks, 1 month, and 2 months ago—data from @COVID19Tracking)
In the days and weeks leading up to Election Day, President Donald Trump claimed that the “fake news media” chose to focus on Covid-19 to damage his campaign, predicting that once November 4th arrived, Americans would not hear about the virus anymore, however, in the seven days since that date, infections and hospitalizations have spiked to unseen levels, shattering previous records.
KEY FACTS
The United States reported a record-setting high of 139,855 new positive cases on Tuesday and 1,448 coronavirus deaths, according to a New York Times database.
In the seven days since Nov. 4, there has been an average of 123,315 new cases per day (a total of 863,205), which is the highest daily average ever recorded in any nation, and an increase of 69% from the average just two weeks earlier.
According to the Covid Tracking Project, a record high of 61,964 people are currently hospitalized in the United States.
A total of 7,021 Americans have been killed by the virus since November 4th, as the daily average death count has risen above 1,000 for the first time since August.
CRITICAL QUOTE:
“That’s all I hear about now. That’s all I hear. Turn on television—’Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid.’ A plane goes down. 500 people dead, they don’t talk about it,” Trump told his supporters at a campaign rally in Lumberton, North Carolina, on October 24th. “Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid.’ By the way, on November 4, you won’t hear about it anymore,”
KEY BACKGROUND:
On October 27th, Trump tweeted: “ALL THE FAKE NEWS MEDIA WANTS TO TALK ABOUT IS COVID, COVID, COVID. ON NOVEMBER 4th, YOU WON’T BE HEARING SO MUCH ABOUT IT ANYMORE. WE ARE ROUNDING THE TURN!!!“ In August, speaking at Republican National Convention, Trump asserted that Democrats were imposing restrictions to damage the economy. He prognosticated that these left-leaning states would reopen after the election. “On November 4th, it will all open up,” said the president, adding, “They want to make our numbers look as bad as possible for the election.” Back in May, Eric Trump, during an appearance on Fox News, said the Democrats “will milk it every single day between now and November 3rd, and guess what, after November 3rd, coronavirus will magically all of a sudden go away and disappear.” In late October, Trump alleged, “Until November 4th., Fake News Media is going full-on Covid, Covid, Covid.” Although the coronavirus is raging out of control, the president has yet to address the pandemic since the election. Trump has tweeted 149 times since Nov. 3 but has not once mentioned Covid, Covid-19, or the coronavirus. Nor has he offered an update to U.S. citizens on how the federal government plans to counteract this most recent nationwide outbreak.
TANGENT:
Vice President Mike Pence is the head of the White House Coronavirus Task Force. According to the Federal Aviation Administration, Pence was scheduled to vacation in Sanibel, Florida, Tuesday through Saturday this week. However, the Washington Post reported Tuesday that Pence is no longer planning to leave Washington.
BIG NUMBER:
240,000. Since the start of the pandemic, more than 10,331,900 Americans have been infected with the coronavirus, and at least 240,200 have died.
For the first time in the coronavirus pandemic, more than 60,000 Americans are hospitalized for Covid-19, according to The COVID Tracking Project, which also reported yet another record for new cases Tuesday—130,989, as the pandemic continues to worsen.
KEY FACTS
61,964 Covid-19 hospitalizations were reported in the U.S. Tuesday, breaking a record that had stood since April 15, when 59,940 were in the hospital.
The record for new cases was also broken, topping 130,000 for the first time, but the old record had stood for just three days.
1,347 deaths were reported, which is the most since Aug. 19, according to The COVID Tracking Project, which collects its data from local reporting agencies.
WHAT TO WATCH FOR
The grim impacts of the third U.S. coronavirus surge are starting to be felt. Hard-hit El Paso, Texas is running out of morgue space, while Tulsa ran out of ICU beds Monday night. In North Dakota, hospitals are at capacity and the state is now taking the extreme step of allowing Covid-positive nurses to keep working in some cases amid a serious staffing shortage.
KEY BACKGROUND
New cases have been rising exponentially since mid-September, with no signs of slowing up. Hospitalizations starting rising around a week later—a rate that has been on the increase. Deaths, which lag behind rises in other metrics, remained relatively steady until around Oct. 18. The death toll has been on a steady rise ever since, with the 7-day rolling average now just shy of 1,000 per day.
TANGENT
President-elect Joe Biden says that fighting coronavirus is a top priority of his incoming administration. He announced a 12-member Covid task force on Monday, with the goal of coming up with a plan to combat the pandemic. That’s in contrast to President Donald Trump, whose administration has not come up with a national plan while the president has continued to make false statements that the U.S. is “rounding the turn” on coronavirus.
The coronavirus pandemic reached a dire milestone Wednesday when the number of new U.S. infections topped 100,000 in one day for the first time, continuing a resurgence that showed no sign of slowing.
The pandemic is roaring across the Midwest and Plains states. Seven states set records for hospitalizations for covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. And Connecticut, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska and North Dakota saw jumps of more than 45 percent in their seven-day rolling average of new infections, considered the best measure of the spread of the virus.
The record, 104,004 cases, was reached a day after the deeply divided nation went to the polls to choose between President Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden, an election widely seen as a choice between fully reopening the economy and aggressively quelling the outbreak.
“It’s clear we’re heading into a period where we’re going to see increasing hospitalization and deaths in the U.S. And it worries me how little we’re doing about it,” said Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the Obama administration. “We know by now how fast this virus can move. You have to get ahead of it.”
After more than nine months of restrictions, some state leaders are hesitant to risk further pandemic fatigue, Frieden said.
But if case counts continue rising at the current rate and strong action isn’t taken, viral transmission may soon reach a point in some areas where nothing will stop the virus except another shutdown, he said.
“The numbers keep going up, and we’re only getting closer and closer to Thanksgiving and Christmas,” when some families are expected to congregate indoors and risk spreading the virus further, said Eleanor Murray, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Boston University. “For so many reasons, the next few weeks are going to be bad for us and good for covid.”
With Trump and his aides fighting to hold on to the White House, the federal response to the pandemic, which already leaves major responsibilities to the states, may be even more fractured, Murray said.
“Something that deeply worries me is either way this election goes, Trump will still be in charge the next few weeks, when cases are higher than they’ve ever been,” she said. “And he’s made clear there will be no top-down, coordinated action coming from the federal government.”
Despite months of surveys that clearly indicated strong voter disapproval of the president’s response to the pandemic could weigh heavily against his reelection effort, more voters chose the economy as the primary issue in casting their ballots, exit polling showed.
Even if Biden captures the White House, the results appear to signal that, for many people, covid-19 is not as daunting as the prospect of being unable to pay their bills or send their children to school.
“I got news for you, pal. Covid-19 is over. It’s done,” said Nick Arnone, owner of HLSM, a software company for the power sports industry in Plains, Pa. “We have therapeutics, so deaths are way down. We are very close to a vaccine. We’ve got to ride it out now.
About 35 percent of voters said the economy was the most important issue for them, while about 17 percent cited the pandemic and about 2 in 10 were motivated most by racial inequality.
At the same time, however, just over half the voters said it is more important to contain the virus, even if that hurts the economy, while slightly more than 4 in 10 said rebuilding the economy is most critical, even if that impairs work to quell the virus.
In El Paso, where the pandemic is surging, James Clark said he voted for Biden because of the uncontrolled outbreak.
“Covid was the main reason . . . and the things he was saying specifically about it,” Clark said. “I mean there were some things Trump was doing well, too, but overall it was covid.”
Some analysts were surprised and concerned that voters appeared to view the decision before them as a choice between the virus and their livelihoods, rather than as intertwined problems that could be solved together.
“That was shocking to me, that Trump could convince so many people it was a choice between the economy and pandemic,” said Eric Topol, a cardiologist and head of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in San Diego. “I’m amazed the extent he pulled that off, because it’s so obviously a false dichotomy. There’s no way for the economy to thrive unless we get control of the pandemic.”
On the campaign trail, Biden warned voters of a “dark winter” and invoked empty chairs in homes where families grieved the death of a loved one. He suggested he would follow science and tighten restrictions in places where that was necessary.
Trump repeatedly declared that the country was “rounding the turn” on the pandemic and said a vaccine was almost ready to be distributed. “You know what we want? We want normal,” Trump said this past weekend in Butler, Pa.
The two political messages were consistent with the viewpoints of each candidate’s base, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
Biden has much more support among urban voters and people of color who, until recently, have been hit harder by the pandemic. Trump’s base is more White and rural, constituencies that have been slammed by the virus only in recent weeks, as the number of infections soared in the Upper Midwest and Plains states, she said.
“Who’s more likely to know someone’s who’s died? People who are already more likely to be Democrats than Republicans,” Jamieson said. “The lived experience of the two constituencies, the base vote for each side, is different.”
In Florida, which Trump carried more easily than expected, Biden’s emphasis on the pandemic hampered grass-roots campaigning, said Susan MacManus, an emerita professor of political science at the University of South Florida. With Biden emphasizing social distancing, the Democratic campaign there followed his lead.
“The Republicans never let their foot off the pedal in terms of continuing to register [voters] and going door to door, all through the covid,” she said. “The Democrats, once covid hit, they made a conscious effort, not going door to door.”
Rep. Donna Shalala (D-Fla.), who appeared to be headed toward losing her seat to television newscaster Maria Elvira Salazar (R) in Miami, campaigned heavily on Trump’s response to the virus.
Stefan Baral, a physician and epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, Wednesday faulted Democrats’ pandemic messaging, saying Biden did not adequately express empathy for the economic hardships caused by the pandemic-related shutdowns.
“This is a terrible virus. But empathy for all the folks who have lost their jobs and lost their opportunities and kids who are out of school — I just never felt that message of empathy come across at all,” Baral said.
When some people heard Biden talk about the dark winter ahead, they thought, “The first thing he’s going to do is close my business,” Baral said.
Voters also had to make up their minds amid a torrent of misinformation and purposeful distortion about the pandemic, said Matthew Seeger, a risk communication expert at Wayne State University in Michigan, who helped the CDC develop its past communications plans.
“The messaging around the pandemic has been deliberately confused and strategically manipulated to downplay its significance,” Seeger said. “You combine that with the fact that this is a slow-moving crisis with risk fatigue starting to settle in, and you can see why public perception is what it is.”
In Chandler, Ariz., a suburb southeast of Phoenix last week, Al Fandick said he considers the pandemic wildly overblown and masks largely pointless. Fandick, 53, who runs a transport company, said he found it absurd that he was required to wear a mask to enter a restaurant but could remove the face covering once he sat down.
“Having a face mask on while I walk into that restaurant, but then I can take that face mask off, that’s like having a peeing section in a pool,” Fandick said.
Aside from trips to visit people in the hospital, he never wore a mask until Maricopa County began mandating it for public spaces, a policy he vehemently opposes, he said.
“Don’t need the hassle,” he said.
On the other side of the gulf are those who see the accelerating pandemic and a possibly very deadly period ahead.
“It is demoralizing to feel like: Here we are in November. A third surge is not just underway, but has already surpassed past surges. And people still don’t understand what’s happening and what’s at stake,” said Murray of Boston University.
“We are in the middle of an emergency. We have cases higher than they have ever been since this pandemic started, and yet you will have people paying less attention than ever to covid,” Murray said. “We as a country are not in a place right now where it’s safe to do that.”
“This is not about lockdowns. … It’s about an aggressive balanced approach that is not being implemented,” says internal White House report that challenges many of Trump’s pronouncements.
A top White House coronavirus adviser sounded alarms Monday about a new and deadly phase in the health crisis, pleading with top administration officials for “much more aggressive action,” even as President Trump continues to assure rallygoers that the nation is “rounding the turn” on the pandemic.
“We are entering the most concerning and most deadly phase of this pandemic … leading to increasing mortality,” said the Nov. 2 report from Deborah Birx, coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force. “This is not about lockdowns — it hasn’t been about lockdowns since March or April. It’s about an aggressive balanced approach that is not being implemented.”
Birx’s internal report, shared with top White House and agency officials, contradicts Trump on numerous points: While the president holds large campaign events with hundreds of attendees, most without masks, she explicitly warns against them. While the president blames rising cases on more testing, she says testing is “flat or declining” in many areas where cases are rising. And while Trump says the country is “rounding the turn,” Birx notes that the country is entering its most dangerous period yet and will see more than 100,000 new cases a day this week.
Through a spokesperson, Birx did not respond to a request for comment.
Other health experts, including Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, have warned of record surges in cases and hospitalizations as the United States records more than 9 million cases and 230,000 deaths.
“We’re in for a whole lot of hurt,” Faucitold The Washington Post late Friday, predicting a long and potentially deadly winter unless there’s an “abrupt change” — prompting Trump to suggest that he planned to fire the scientist after the election.
But Birx’s daily missives go further, revealing how much the administration’s internal reports are in direct conflict with Trump’s public pronouncements that downplay the seriousness of the threat and erroneously suggest that few people are dying. They also speak to the increasing desperation of health officials to spotlight the risks of a pandemic that is forecast to take thousands more lives as the weather worsens unless people change their behaviors. Some officials are also concerned about recouping their reputations in a post-Trump era.
The increasingly dire tone of Birx’s reports has gotten little traction, according to an administration official who works with her and spoke on the condition of anonymity to share sensitive information. “She feels like she’s being ignored,” the official said.
Birx’s message “has been urgent for weeks,” said another administration official, “as has the plea for the administration to ask the American people to use masks, avoid gatherings and socially distance, basically since it became apparent that we were heading into a third surge.”
The report hits hard on the worsening situation: “Cases are rapidly rising in nearly 30 percent of all USA counties, the highest number of county hotspots we have seen with this pandemic,” it said. “Half of the United States is in the red or orange zone for cases despite flat or declining testing.”
Sounding a similar theme to past reports, it calls for “much more aggressive action from messaging, to testing, to surging personnel around the country before the crisis point.”
What is “essential at this time point,” the report said, is “consistent messaging about uniform use of masks, physical distancing and hand washing with profound limitation on indoor gatherings especially with family and friends.”
It adds: “This is about empowerment Americans with the knowledge and data for decision-making to prevent community spread and save lives.”
The president appears unpersuaded by such messages, convinced by new medical adviser Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist with no infectious-disease experience, that allowing healthy people to return to daily activities without restrictions will hasten herd immunity and bolster the economy, say some advisers who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Trump plans to hold a large indoor gathering for 300 to 400 guests at the White House on Tuesday to watch the election returns, only a few weeks after a White House event to announce his Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett became a superspreader event.
White House communications director Alyssa Farah disputed the report’s suggestion that the administration’s response has been inadequate to the crisis. She said the White House has “significantly increased” the U.S. national stockpile to ensure the country has sufficient personal protective equipment; bought 150 million coronavirus tests and distributed them to the most vulnerable populations, including nursing homes, assisted-living facilities and Native American tribal areas; and sent special teams to states and nursing homes with the most cases.
In addition, she said, the administration continues to work to “safely rush therapeutics” to the sick and develop vaccines. “We are working around-the-clock to safely treat the virus and ultimately defeat it,” Farah said.
Birx’s report goes to pains to dispute Trump’s false claims that coronavirus cases are increasing only because of increases in testing. Monday’s report notes that although testing is flat, a rising number of tests are positive, suggesting “community spread is much worse than is evident by current [measurements].”
An earlier, Oct. 17 report sounded the same theme: It cited increasing daily hospital admissions, rising fatalities and emergency room visits, and bluntly stated, “this is not due to increased testing but broad and ever-increasing community spread.”
That report added these words highlighted in bold: “There is an absolute necessity of the Administration to use this moment to ask the American people to wear masks, physical distance and avoid gatherings in both public and private spaces.” On that day, Trump held two large rallies, according to his public schedule, one in Michigan and one in Wisconsin.
Birx’s report goes to pains to dispute Trump’s false claims that coronavirus cases are increasing only because of increases in testing. Monday’s report notes that although testing is flat, a rising number of tests are positive, suggesting “community spread is much worse than is evident by current [measurements].”
An earlier, Oct. 17 report sounded the same theme: It cited increasing daily hospital admissions, rising fatalities and emergency room visits, and bluntly stated, “this is not due to increased testing but broad and ever-increasing community spread.”
That report added these words highlighted in bold: “There is an absolute necessity of the Administration to use this moment to ask the American people to wear masks, physical distance and avoid gatherings in both public and private spaces.” On that day, Trump held two large rallies, according to his public schedule, one in Michigan and one in Wisconsin.
Officials describe Birx as frustrated with Atlas’s growing influence. She has challenged his views in task force meetings, suggesting that reopening society without any restrictions would lead to thousands of deaths.
In recent weeks, Birx has crisscrossed the country, traveling to dozens of virus hot spots, where she has urged state and local officials to mandate masks, close bars and restaurants and encourage distancing.
Birx is said to be close to Vice President Pence, but he’s been on the road campaigning in recent weeks, taking his attention away from the coronavirus, according to a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share internal discussions.
Unlike Fauci, a highly regarded civil servant who Trump has criticized as a “Democrat,” Birx was chosen by the administration to helm the response and has been lavishly praised in the past by Trump.
Fauci said in his interview Friday that he and Birx lost the president’s ear as Trump worried increasingly about a sputtering economy and his reelection prospects.
“They needed to have a medical message that was essentially consistent with what they were saying, and one of the ways to say: ‘The outbreak is over. [Mitigation strategies are] really irrelevant because it doesn’t make any difference. All you need to do is prevent people from dying and protect people in places like the nursing homes,’ ” Fauci said.
HENRY KOTULA 