Focus on surging pandemic dims as two other infections grab headlines
The coronavirus pandemic continues to give Americans a crash course in global infectious diseases, with experts and regular folks warily watching not only the virus’s continuing summer surge but also seeing with concern increasing incidences of rare hepatitis cases in kids and outbreaks of monkeypox in travelers and among partying gay men.
While the other infections have received their share of news coverage, the pandemic persists as the nation’s leading public health menace, as the New York Times reported in this summary of the latest overall coronavirus situation:
“The United States is averaging about 110,000 new cases each day, a roughly 30% increase over the last two weeks. Since many cases go uncounted in official reports, the true toll is higher than these figures show. Daily case reports are four times as high as they were in early April, but still a fraction of the numbers seen in January, when the initial Omicron surge was at its worst.