Colorado, Idaho and New Mexico hospitals are operating under crisis standards of care. Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin hospitals are at, or near, the brink as cases that had been steadily increasing since school began exploded once the weather turned cold.
“This is taking up every waking moment,” Natasha Bagdasarian, the chief medical executive for the Michigan health department told POLITICO. “No part of the state has been spared.”
States across the country are also seeing a growing number of people with breakthrough cases end up in hospitals. In Michigan, for example, 28 percent of hospitalizations and 24 percent of deaths, between Oct. 7 and Nov. 5, were among fully vaccinated individuals.
The latest Covid surge is particularly concerning to health officials because holiday travel is expected to exacerbate the problem as it did last year when Thanksgiving and Christmas gatherings fueled a record number of new infections and led to more than 100,000 deaths in January.
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