"This is starting to look really ominous in the South"

“This is starting to look really ominous in the South. … If you look at rates of transmission in Florida and Louisiana, they’re actually probably the highest in the world,” Dr. Peter Hotez, the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Friday…

And in Alabama, there is an alarming uptick of infants as well as teenagers hospitalized with Covid-19, according to Dr. David Kimberlin, the director of the Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases at the University of Alabama in Birmingham.

“We’re seeing a lot of children who are very, very sick admitted to our hospital. We have almost twice as many right now as we did at the previous worst part of this pandemic, which was probably in January,” Kimberlin told CNN’s Erin Burnett Friday.

“These children are coming in fighting for breath, fighting for the ability to basically get through this devastating illness, many of them are on ventilators, maybe a quarter or so on ventilators or heart-lung bypass machines,” he said.