The bad news: COVID-19 appears to be filling hospitals throughout the South and the Southwest with patients with a deadly, highly contagious disease. The good news: The federal government is now publishing a COVID-19 hospital bed occupancy map that looks terrible.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been trying to track COVID-19 with a weekly collection of maps, tables and charts based largely on the data sources and methods used to track influenza.
The idea has been that, in many ways, early and mild cases of COVID-19 are similar to cases of the flu, and that the CDC could use its flu tracking system to monitor the new pandemic.
But, for whatever reason, the CDC’s flu-based tracking system shows appears to show that the United States has defeated COVID-19.