More Than 100,000 Virus Patients Are Hospitalized in the U.S., a First.

Covid-19 Live Updates: More Than 100,000 Virus Patients Are Hospitalized in the U.S., a First. The Centers for Disease Control head warned that this winter may be the “most difficult time” in U.S. public health history. The U.K. became the first country to approve Pfizer’s vaccine, paving the way for mass inoculations. nytimes

The number of Covid-19 patients in American hospitals has surpassed 100,000 for the first time, nearly double the number from spring during the coronavirus’s deadly first wave, according to the Covid Tracking Project.

The Tracking Project on Wednesday put the number of patients at 100,226.

The relentless rise in hospitalizations follows a rapid climb in new cases, which now number more than one million every week. And deaths, a so-called lagging indicator that tends to spike after a rise in hospitalizations, have also been rising fast. They have now passed 270,000 in the U.S.

The numbers paint a sobering picture of what the next few weeks may look like, experts said. Hospitals in some places are nearing capacity, and if states are unable to curb the surge of new cases, those systems could soon become overwhelmed, as New York was in the spring.

“Any thinking person has to be worried,” said Philip Landrigan, the director of a global public health program at Boston College. “That we have so many hospitalizations speaks to the fact that we have done a very poor job of controlling this pandemic. It is spreading very rapidly, and in many places, it is basically spreading out of control.”

Still, the situation today is different from the spring.

Hospitalizations are climbing steadily, but they are not keeping pace with the soaring number of cases. The share of people infected with the coronavirus who are admitted to hospitals has actually been shrinking, a twist in the data for which experts offer different theories.

One explanation is testing. Many more people today are getting tested than at the start of the pandemic and that is turning up many more mild cases. And many of those who do contract the virus become far less sick, said Dr. Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, meaning they are less likely to need hospitalization.

But Dr. Rivers does not believe that the share of people who are sick enough to need hospitalization has changed that much. It is just that now they are spread across the United States, unlike the spring, when they were concentrated in New York and New England. ...