America Goes Viral, Con't

As we cross the Rubicon of 200,000 new COVID-19 cases per day, 80,000 COVID-19 hospitalizations, and 2,000 daily deaths, keep in mind this is all before Thanksgiving week, where tens of millions of Americans are expected to ignore CDC guidance and spread the pandemic nationally over the next several days, with exactly the kind of behavior that will exponentially increase our current disastrous figures. At this point hospitals are begging Americans to stay home as they are running out of healthy staff.

More than 1,000 hospitals across the United States are "critically" short on staff, according to numbers released this week by the Department of Health and Human Services.

Those hospitals, which span all 50 states, Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico, represent about 18% of all hospitals that report their staffing status to HHS. And that number is expected to grow: 21% of all hospitals reporting say they anticipate having critical staffing shortages in the next week.

The worst-hit state is North Dakota with 51% of hospitals that reported saying they're facing shortages; seven states say over 30% of their hospitals are in trouble.

This is the first time the federal agency has released this data, which includes limited reports going back to summer. The federal government consistently started collecting this data in July. After months of steadily trending upward, the number of hospitals reporting shortages crossed 1,000 this month and has stayed above since.

The data, however, are still incomplete. Not all hospitals that report daily status COVID-19 updates to HHS are reporting their staffing situations, so it's impossible to tell for sure how much these numbers have increased.

While the data is a welcome addition to the arsenal of information that public health officials have to fight COVID-19, it highlights the shortcomings of what the federal government has made available to the public. Though the government has precise daily figures for COVID-19 hospitalizations at thousands of the country's hospitals, it shares only a small subset of this information to people outside government.

Pinar Karaca-Mandic, a professor at the University of Minnesota who leads a project that collects COVID-19 hospital data, calls the new information release a "very positive data development and effort."

"That offers a possibility to plan ahead, especially the anticipated staffing shortages," she says. There is still a lot of hospitalization data that the federal government does not make public that could further inform researchers and the public, she says, including the ages and race of those hospitalized.

Looking ahead toward the next week, additional hospitals report expecting staffing shortages in 40 states, as well as Puerto Rico. Nebraska, Virginia and Missouri top the list in places that are expected to have the biggest upticks.

Basically if Thanksgiving is as bad as I believe it's going to be, you can double all the already record-setting COVID-19 numbers this week by December, and I think that's being extremely generous.  I believe 400K-500K new cases, 160K-200K hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths a day are very possible. And that many hospitalizations will rapidly overwhelm the American hospital system.

December 2020 is going to be a living nightmare, one every American will remember for the rest of their lives.

And for possibly hundreds of thousands of us, those lives won't make it to January.