COVID19 Update - Day 217

US Tests: 111,761,185*

US Cases: 7,817,857*

US Deaths: 207,557*

Worldwide Cases: 38,041,143*

Worldwide Deaths: 1,084,888*

* - Numbers are a lower bound.  True numbers are being suppressed by the Trump administration

Jesus.  Get ready:

As predicted, the US is now grappling with a new Covid-19 surge -- one that could overwhelm hospitals, kill thousands of Americans a day by January and leave even young survivors with long-term complications.

"We went down to the lowest point lately in early September, around 30,000-35,000 new cases a day. Now we're back up to (about) 50,000 new cases a day. And it's going to continue to rise," Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, said Tuesday.

"This is the fall/winter surge that everyone was worried about. And now it's happening. And it's happening especially in the northern Midwest, and the Northern states are getting hit very hard -- Wisconsin, Montana, the Dakotas. But it's going to be nationally soon enough."

Across the country, more than 30 states have reported more Covid-19 cases this past week than they reported the previous week, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

And Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert, sounded an alarm about certain states' test-positivity rates, saying they may be a good indicator that steeper climbs in case rates are ahead.

For the whole country, test positivity averaged 5.1% over the past week as of Tuesday. But in at least 13 states, the figure was above 10%: in Alabama, Florida, Iowa, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, South Dakota, Utah, Wisconsin and Wyoming, according to the COVID Tracking Project.

Obviously, Trump and his legions of vice-signaling, mask-denying #COVIDIOTS are responsible for making this crisis much worse than it needed to be.  But Trump is himself personally responsible for holding one superspreader event after another in the last weeks of the campaign, seemingly hell-bent on personally spreading the #TrumpVirus to infect and kill as many people as possible.