Instead, with more than 160,000 new cases a day and about 100,000 Covid patients hospitalized nationwide, this holiday feels more like a flashback to 2020. In Kansas, many state employees were sent home to work remotely again. In Arizona, where school mask mandates are banned, thousands of students and teachers have had to go into quarantine. In Hawaii, the governor has issued a plea to tourists: Don’t visit.
“The irony is that things got so good in May and most of June that all of us, including me, were talking about the end game,” said Dr. John Swartzberg, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, Berkeley. “We started to enjoy life again. Within a very few weeks, it all came crashing down.”
The resurgence has left the country exhausted, nervous and less certain than ever about when normalcy might return.
More than 1,500 Americans are dying most days, worse than when cases surged last summer but far lower than the winter peak. Though the rate of case growth nationally has slowed in recent days and incremental progress has been made in Southern states, other regions are in the midst of growing outbreaks. And with millions of schoolchildren now returning to classrooms — some for the first time since March 2020 — public health experts say that more coronavirus clusters in schools are inevitable.
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