Alexa Gagosz of the Boston Globe tweeted out a little while a note from Sage Myers, who appears to be a Pennsylvania doctor, with the following scary message:

Just finished an ED shift. Literally everyone has COVID. Everyone. And the few people who don’t have COVID have the flu.

There are never enough beds. Or enough people to staff those beds.

The waiting room is full.

I’m so so so tired.

Gagosz follows that up with a report from a woman in Illinois talking about how her mother can’t get a non-ER room or receive visitors because of COVID precautions.

If we stop searching the country for unverified panic and look to Rhode Island, what do we find in the data?  As of this writing, the data on the state’s tracking site shows new hospital admissions going down, week after week, even as cases go up.

Sure, there’s a lag between cases and hospitalizations, but cases have been climbing for weeks, at this point, while deaths have been pretty steady, or even decreasing, except for an outlier day that might have to do with reporting peculiarities.