Thread by @jbendery

Infectious disease expert Michael Osterholm on what Americans should expect from the coronavirus pandemic in the next few months:

“We are about to enter COVID hell." huffpost.com/entry/michael-…

Expect daily new infections to spike + hospitals overrun + quality of care to drop.

"I don’t think America quite gets this yet. This is going to get much worse. This is not to scare people out of their wits. This is to scare people into their wits because we still have control."

Holy. Shit. Look at this.

Today's snapshot of each state's progress in reducing COVID cases/hospitalizations/death, via covidexitstrategy.org

Green is trending better.

Yellow is caution warranted.

Red is going downhill.

Bruised red is uncontrolled spread.

AWFUL.

The entire United States is facing an "uncontrolled spread" of COVID-19.

Three states are plain red, which is bad enough. One state, Vermont, is yellow. Literally EVERYWHERE else is uncontrolled spread.

Devastating. It did not have to be this way.

Another way of looking at this data: can our health care system handle this spread? This map uses bed and ICU availability, case fatality rate + cases per capita as a proxy for the load on our hospitals.

The Midwest is already busting, along with Alaska and Rhode Island.

Here's a snapshot of all the metrics we're failing on.

The one state that is yellow, Vermont, has still seen a 25% increase in positive COVID cases in the last 2 weeks.

Meanwhile, the Senate is back in session today so Mitch McConnell can confirm another judge while echoing Trump's lies about widespread voter fraud in the election. No action to stem this public health emergency.

It's all so backwards.

2 weeks.

We could have shut down everything for 2-3 weeks in the spring and avoided this.