The United States accounts for more than one-fifth of the world's total COVID-19 cases for the first time since mid-February, before vaccines were widely available, a analysis of Johns Hopkins University data shows. And hospitalizations have hit pandemic highs among all ages under 50, reported the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“We’re seeing a lot of people get seriously ill,” Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the Biden administration’s lead adviser on the pandemic, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “The hospitalizations are on the brink of actually overrunning the hospitals, particularly intensive care units.” Every county in the states of Connecticut and Massachusetts are the site of high or substantial transmission of the coronavirus, the CDC said Sunday. 

Dr. Geoff Lifferth, the chief medical officer at Sumner Regional Medical Center, a 167-bed hospital in suburbs of the health care mecca of Nashville, said what many Tennessee doctors knew to be true: The coronavirus, empowered by the new variant, is overtaking hospitals faster than ever. “There are no beds,” he warned on Facebook Thursday. “As an ER doc and a health care administrator, the past week has been one of the most exhausting and disheartening of my career. The delta variant has burned through us with a ferocity that’s hard to describe.”

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