Virus Outbreak, Once in the Nation’s Middle, Gains Steam All Around (Source The New York Times)

The reason the country is continuing to break case records has less to do with North Dakota and Wisconsin than it does with swift resurgences of the virus in cities like Baltimore, Los Angeles, Miami and Phoenix and with first-time spikes in smaller cities away from the nation’s middle, like Cumberland, Maryland. “Our people are tired,” said Maggie Hansen, chief nursing executive at Memorial Healthcare System in south Florida. Coronavirus cases are emerging in their highest numbers of the pandemic, with more than 175,000 a day, on average, in a country that has seen more cases and more deaths than anywhere else in the world. More than 1.2 million cases have been identified in the United States in the past week alone, and the country is on pace to reach 13 million known cases in the coming days. Deaths are also rising fast, with more than 2,200 announced nationwide Tuesday, the most on a single day since early May. Iowa and South Dakota continue to report new cases at some of the highest rates in the country, and deaths there have reached their highest levels on record. But the pace of the spread has slowed in those regions while rapidly increasing in other, more populous parts of the country, including in California, where more than 17,000 cases were announced Monday, and in Texas, where more than 20,000 cases were announced Tuesday, the two highest daily totals of any state during the pandemic. All of this has been unfolding on the eve of what infectious-disease experts see as a likely turning point for the outbreak in this country. An infectious-disease physician and epidemiologist at the University of Iowa said he feared the worst was still yet to come in his state, especially with Thanksgiving gatherings and cold weather looming.