Covid-19 Live Updates: U.S. Hospitalizations Top 61,000, a Record

Covid-19 Live Updates: U.S. Hospitalizations Top 61,000, a Record U.S. health officials are detailing a possible time for treatments and vaccines. Italy is sealing off more parts of the country as the number of new coronavirus cases rises. nytimes

Covid-19 hospitalizations in the United States hit an all-time high of 61,964 on Tuesday, as the raging pandemic continued to shatter record after record and strain medical facilities.

The number of people hospitalized with the coronavirus, tallied by the Covid Tracking Project, has more than doubled since September, and now exceeds the peak reached early in the pandemic, when 59,940 hospitalized patients were reported on April 15. A second peak in the summer fell just short of matching that record, with 59,718 hospitalizations on July 23.

Those spikes in April and July lasted only a few days and quickly subsided, but as winter approaches experts do not expect that this time. New cases are setting records in much of the United States, and rates of hospitalizations and deaths are following them upward.

The United States surpassed 10 million known cases on Sunday, and is averaging more than 111,000 new cases a day, a record.

While the number of patients continues to climb, a shortage of nurses and other medical personnel is limiting the ability to add more hospital beds to care for them.

The critical staff shortage, especially in Western states that struggle to attract doctors and other medical workers even in the best of times, is causing growing alarm, and driving some places to take extraordinary measures.

El Paso, a border city of 680,000, now has more people hospitalized with Covid-19 than most states — 1,076 as of Tuesday — and is more than doubling its supply of mobile morgues, to 10 from four.

The University Medical Center, a teaching hospital in El Paso, set up tents to care for patients in a parking lot. A downtown convention center became a field hospital, and the state began airlifting dozens of intensive care patients to other cities to free up more space.

Gov. Douglas J. Burgum of North Dakota, which has the worst infection and death rates per person in the country, announced on Monday that health care workers who have tested positive but have no symptoms could continue to work in hospitals and nursing homes under certain restrictions, including that they treat only Covid-19 patients. ...