Could a second surge of COVID-19 deaths be approaching?
Former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson responds to death rate predictions as coronavirus cases rise across U.S.
Former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson told "The Story" Thursday that the number of coronavirus hospitalizations and ICU capacity is holding steady in so-called "hot spots" Arizona and Texas, despite a rise in the death toll and the number of confirmed cases in both states.
"The hospitals in Texas and Arizona -- I watched this very, very closely -- the hospitals right now are not getting more COVID patients," said Berenson, the author of "Unreported Truths About COVID-19 and Lockdowns."
"For the last week, numbers have been roughly flat in Arizona and southeast Texas," he added. "The last five days, they've been flat in Arizona ... and all of Texas and that's a very good sign. Deaths are rising, but we are talking about 300 deaths in Florida, Arizona, Texas today ... compare that to New York. New York had close to 1,000 deaths day after day ...
"We're talking about a different order of magnitude."
Berenson's comments come a day after The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported nearly 61,000 new cases of coronavirus in the U.S. -- with Arizona, Florida and Texas accounting for 40 percent of the total.
The new spike raises the question of whether "the last four weeks are a precursor to the next four," Berenson said, acknowledging that if that is the case, the U.S. is "in trouble."
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"In Texas, for example, 10,000 people [are currently] hospitalized with COVID and five or six weeks ago there were 2,000 people hospitalized," he explained.
However, Berenson told host Martha MacCallum, "the good news is, it doesn't look like that surge is continuing. When we look worldwide, not just New York but worldwide, this is what we see practically everywhere. The same pattern. If you get the surge, things top out and there's a plateau ... there’s deaths, but you don't get a surge that goes on forever."
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