There are 2 million confirmed cases of the coronavirus in the United States.
Of those cases, roughly 113,000 of them have been deadly. When America grieved for the 100,000 who died, USA TODAY’s Editorial Board called it an American tragedy.
That was two weeks ago.
On Wednesday, we wrote about the alarming spread of COVID-19 in Arizona and other states, with health officials increasingly worried about the number of cases requiring hospitalizations.
Now health officials are warning of a potential second round of infections. “There is a new wave coming in parts of the country,” said Eric Toner, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told Bloomberg. “It’s small and it’s distant so far, but it’s coming.”
A Harvard researcher told CNN that as many as 100,000 additional U.S. deaths could come by September.
Experts around the country and in Arizona are raising alarms about the state’s COVID-19 situation because cases and hospitalizations have increased for the past two weeks.
The increase in cases can’t solely be attributed to increased testing in Arizona, experts say.
Instead, it looks like the state is trending upward in a way that is concerning and could need another stay-at-home order to curb the spread.
“I would go so far as to say alarming,” said Dr. William Hanage, an epidemiology professor at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. ”The only sort of crumb of comfort that I can find is that I think, in general, it’s sort of easier to social distance in Arizona than it is in some places.”
Arizona’s largest hospital system warned over the past week that its intensive care units are filling up, ventilator use was on the rise and capacity was reached for extracorporeal membrane oxygenation treatment.
“We have seen a steady climb of COVID-19 cases in Arizona over the last two weeks,” Banner Health tweeted Monday. ”This trend is concerning to us, and also correlates with a rise in cases that we are seeing in our hospital ICUs.”
