“It’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen, even at the peak of the prior surges of Covid,” Dr. James Phillips, who works in Washington, DC, said Wednesday, when the nation hit a new pandemic high of 300,886 average new daily cases over the prior week, according to Johns Hopkins University data.

“What we’re experiencing right now is an absolute overwhelming of the emergency departments” in Washington, Phillips, chief of disaster medicine at George Washington University Hospital, told CNN’s Jim Acosta.

It’s a scene playing out across the country as record case counts are reported from New Jersey and New York to Arkansas and Chicago, where hospital bed capacity also is a concern. In Arizona and New Mexico, federal medical personnel have deployed to provide Covid-19 surge support.