COVID

U.S. sets record for daily deaths as hospitals nationwide near or exceed capacity

“There is not a lot of wiggle room."

Medical staff members prepare to move a patient in the COVID-19 intensive care unit (ICU) at the United Memorial Medical Center in Houston, Texas. Go Nakamura/Getty Images

By Eric Nagourney and Neil MacFarquhar, New York Times Service

2 minutes to read

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The onslaught has been relentless.

Late Wednesday in the United States, the daily death toll exceeded the record set just one week earlier: 2,885.

By midnight it had climbed to 3,053, and total deaths since the coronavirus spread into the country at the beginning of the year and began laying siege had reached 289,529.

If U.S. hospitals were any guide, those numbers are unlikely to dip any time soon.

Hospitals across the country are operating near or above capacity as they cope with a growing flood of COVID-19 cases. New data released this week by the Department of Health and Human Services offered a detailed geographic picture of the crisis, with more than a third of Americans living in areas where hospitals are running critically short of intensive care beds.

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With so many hospitals facing the same problems, the elasticity in the health care system is gone, and medical workers are being run ragged.

“There is not a lot of wiggle room,” said Loy Howard, president of the Tanner Health System. “I have been doing this for 35 years, and I have not seen this kind of wear and tear on the staff.”

The five-hospital Tanner Health System near Atlanta expanded the number of critical care beds to 30, but its officials are still scrambling from before dawn to the end of the day.

“The worry is,” said Deborah Matthews, the chief nursing officer, “what are you going to do with the 31st ICU patient? What are you going to do with the next patient who needs to be on a ventilator? You have contingency plans for all of that, but you are just constantly thinking about those things.”

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With no immediate relief in sight, the United States was bearing down on a ghastly mark likely days away: 300,000 deaths since the coronavirus outbreak began.

The milestones are being toppled as U.S. officials race to approve and distribute a COVID-19 vaccine for Americans. Britain began vaccinating its own citizens this week, and Canada appears near to doing the same.

But things have moved more slowly in a country still mired over a presidential election that took place more than a month ago, with many Republicans refusing to acknowledge the results and some working actively to undo them.

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