Over the past month, economies have started to open back up as millions of Americans have been eager to begin to get back to normal. Policymakers have had to make tough calls about balancing the need for economic recovery with the need to curb the spread of coronavirus.
There has been a lot of talk about whether or not a second wave of the virus will hit when things open back up.
And now some data is starting to come in that is pretty revealing.
We already know that cases are rising fast around the globe but even here in the US things are not looking good for certain states.
Since Memorial Day, at least 12 states have seen coronavirus related hospitalizations increase.
The states include:
- Alaska
- Arkansas
- Arizona
- California
- Kentucky
- Mississippi
- Montana
- North Carolina
- Oregon
- South Carolina
- Texas
- Utah
Data aggregated by CNN from the Covid Tracking Project from May 25 to June 9.
There is usually a 2 to 3 week lag when it comes to coronavirus data showing up. That’s because it takes a while for the disease to spread, for people to become symptomatic, and then for people to get confirmed results that they are positive.
So it’s no surprise that we are seeing the results now.
And it makes you wonder how much worse things will get in another couple of weeks from the George Floyd protests.
The vast majority of protesters were wearing masks that I saw so that’s a good sign but I think there still will be in a spike just based on the sheer numbers of people who participated in the protests.
Some states are spiking worse than others.
In the state where I currently reside, Arizona, they are starting to get worried about overwhelming the healthcare system again.
Health experts have asked them to activate their hospital emergency plans as intensive care unit beds are now having high occupancy rates. Consider that at its peak, Arizona’s intensive care unit beds were 78% in use and as of Monday, 76% were occupied.
This doesn’t come as a total surprise to me as I’ve seen a lot of people in places like grocery stores not wearing masks over the past couple of weeks.
I even saw an employee at an MVD building (Arizona’s equivalent of the department of motor vehicles) not wearing a mask despite the fact that she was coming into contact with tons of people throughout the day.
It seems people were taking things very seriously up until they announced they were easing back on the lockdowns around mid-May.
So hopefully this is a wake up call to anybody who thinks that the coronavirus is no longer posing a major threat.
I think we owe it to everybody and our healthcare workers to be smart and to wear masks whenever we can to prevent further spread.
Daniel Gillaspia is the Founder of UponArriving.com and the credit card app, WalletFlo. He is a former attorney turned travel expert covering destinations along with TSA, airline, and hotel policies. Since 2014, his content has been featured in publications such as National Geographic, Smithsonian Magazine, and CNBC. Read my bio.
