Daily infections ballooned a staggering amount over the last month, but daily deaths resulting from that backlog of infections are only just now starting to catch up.
Deaths are a lagging indictor, as you know, and someone who was infected in the first week November may succumb to the virus today.
According to Johns Hopkins University, over 2,800 were killed by the coroanvirus yesterday and that is a new record compared to a high of 2,600 deaths recorded earlier this year.
From NPR:
Data from the COVID Tracking Project show 100,226 people were hospitalized on Wednesday with the disease caused by the coronavirus — a figure that has been steadily rising for weeks.
Johns Hopkins University, which tracks coronavirus case data, reported that 2,804 news deaths were recorded on Wednesday. It initially reported 3,157 new deaths on that day, but revised the number down due to a "tech glitch," a JHU representative tells NPR.
The death toll surpasses the previous peak of 2,607 deaths on April 15.
It feels insane to me that we shut down most of the economy earlier this year when infection rates and deaths weren't as bad as they are now, but we're not shutting down very many things today.
The primary reason we're not doing that is because Senate Republicans and their leader Mitch McConnell -- a man appropriately known as the "Grim Reaper" of legislation -- have not agreed to pass any significantly stimulus in the last eight months.
We can't shut down the economy unless we give people money to survive and Republicans aren't willing to give people money. It's that simple.
Infections spread by Thanksgiving gatherings won't show up in data until next week at the earliest and anyone who dies as a result of those infections will die sometime around Christmas.
Wear your masks. It's cold anyway, so wear gloves while you're at it.