It’s so hard for me to wrap my head around just how dire our coronavirus situation is right now.

139,855 new U.S. cases yesterday. Another record. The spread is totally out of control.

Here are some ways to put these kind of numbers in perspective:

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https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html

139,855 new cases in a single day is more than many countries have discovered/reported over the entirety of the pandemic:

• Japan: 110,852
• Nigeria: 64,336
• Greece: 60,570
• South Korea: 27,799
• Australia: 27,671

2/ https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/world/coronavirus-maps.html

With a rolling average of 123,315 new U.S. cases per day, the virus is all around us:

• 1 out of every 2,364 people were identified as positive yesterday alone
• Over the past week, it was 1 out of every 382 U.S. residents
• In North Dakota, it was 1 out of 83 in one week

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Another way to look at this: In the U.S., some 3.3 million have been identified as positive for Covid-19 just since September 24.

That is 1 out of every 100 U.S. residents.

And that doesn't include the many people who are infected but never get identified.

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We know that hospitalizations and deaths lag case numbers. Look back at mid-June, when case numbers started rising. Hospitalizations didn’t start rising until about a week later. Deaths started rising two weeks after that, in July.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html

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The hospitalization surge is upon us. We have 61,964 people in the hospital with Covid-19, double from Oct. 1.

1 out of every 5,325 people in the U.S. are hospitalized with coronavirus at this very moment.

In South Dakota, it’s 1 out of every 1,629.

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https://covidtracking.com/data/charts/us-currently-hospitalized

Think about it this way: If you filled the seats at the Rose Bowl with random Americans today, 237 people in the crowd would have tested positive for coronavirus in the past week. 17 would be Covid-19 patients coming from the hospital.

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