Even as President Trump insists that children must return to school in a matter of weeks, the nation appears no closer to controlling this worst-in-a-century medical emergency than it was months ago.
The number of patients hospitalized with covid-19 has roughly doubled over the past month as the disease caused by the novel coronavirus tightened its grip on states such as California, Florida, Texas and Arizona. U.S. hospitals treated 59,670 people on Friday, just shy of the mid-April record of 59,940, according to the Covid Tracking Project.
At least 143,000 Americans have died of covid-19 and more than 4.1 million have been infected, according to data tracked by The Washington Post. As of Saturday evening, the seven-day averages for new cases hit fresh highs in Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Kentucky, Alaska, Mississippi, Missouri, Indiana, Kansas and California, according to The Post’s tracking....
California, South Carolina, Georgia, Texas and Florida set records for their seven-day averages of daily deaths.
The galloping outbreak appears to have bested efforts to return the economy to normal functioning, at least for now. After regaining almost one-third of the nearly 21 million jobs lost when most nonessential businesses closed this spring, the U.S. economy appears to be losing momentum....
