Watch and worry

In Texas, coronavirus hospitalizations have broken records for three days running. In Arizona, public health officials are calling the spread of COVID-19, which threatens to overwhelm hospitals, alarming. These are among nine recently reopened states seeing their highest average caseloads since the pandemic began.

None of them are experiencing anything approaching the carnage of New York and New Jersey, which will hopefully continue to stand out as agonizing anomalies. But the upticks show the war against the virus is far from won, and suggest premature complacency, particularly on vital mask-wearing and social distancing measures, could doom thousands of additional Americans.

It is not just the expiration of state stayat-home orders that are giving the pathogen a new lease on life. Mass protests and arrests in response to the killing of George Floyd may very well help the bug find new host cells, another gratuitous cruelty to black Americans, to whom it has proven most lethal. What a compoundsing tragedy if, in making a statement about unjust deaths at the hands of police, hundreds or even thousands more perish.

The United States has registered 112,000 of the world’s 413,000 coronavirus deaths to date, which means a nation with one-twenty-fifth of the world’s population has suffered more than one-quarter of its deaths.

The summer sun is likely to help, but fall and flu season are around the bend. Is President Trump serious about bringing back huge political rallies soon in North Carolina and Arizona, two of the states with rising hospitalization rates?