Surge pushes U.S. Hospitals Close to Brink, signaling crisis is widening

More people are on track to be hospitalized with the coronavirus in the United States than at any point in the pandemic, a disturbing sign of how the current surge has spread widely and is seriously sickening as many people as ever.

Across the country, 59,628 people were being treated in hospitals on Wednesday, according to the Covid Tracking Project, nearing an earlier peak of 59,940 on April 15, when the center of the outbreak was New York.

The country is averaging more than 66,000 new virus cases per day, more than twice as many as a month ago, and deaths have also started trending upward, with an average of more than 800 daily. But hospitalizations may be the clearest measure of how widely the virus is causing the most serious illnesses, and could offer a glimpse of what is ahead.

“Once you get to the point of being hospitalized or in the I.C.U., some notable portion of those people will die,” said Natalie E. Dean, an infectious-disease expert at the University of Florida. Even when patients walk out of the hospital, “we don’t know what the long-term consequences are,” she said. “Surviving doesn’t mean thriving.”

Not long ago, things seemed to be improving. Fewer than 28,000 patients were hospitalized as of mid-June, when a new surge of cases was appearing throughout the Sun Belt.

The uptick in hospitalized patients around the country reflects a different phase of the pandemic — a widening geographic area, especially across the South, for the most serious illnesses compared with what had been a relatively concentrated crisis in the spring.