US COVID-19 hospitalizations have hit an all-time high

From the article:

For context, there are now 40 percent more people hospitalized with COVID-19 than there were two weeks ago.

[...]

The new hospitalization record underscores that we’ve entered the worst period for the pandemic since the original outbreak in the Northeast. Although the number of detected cases was much lower back then because of test shortages, the large number of hospitalizations (and deaths) indicate that there were many more times the number of infections than our then-embryonic and broken testing system could confirm.

[...]

Seventeen states are at their current peaks for hospitalizations today. According to local news reports, hospitals are already on the brink of being overwhelmed in Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Texas, Utah, and Wisconsin, and officials in many other states warn that their healthcare systems will be dangerously stressed if cases continue to rise.

[...]

Treatments for COVID-19 have improved since the Northeast outbreak. The ratio of hospitalizations to deaths has fallen tremendously since the spring. But it is also true that wherever we see hospitalizations go up, deaths rise two to three weeks later.

From Trevor Bedford on Twitter:

There is a lag between when a case is diagnosed and when the individual may succumb to their disease and there is a further lag between date of death and when the death is reported [...] a 22-day lag maximizes state-level correlations [...] looking forwards, this lag-adjusted CFR suggests that 118,976 reported cases today (with 7-day smoothing) will translate to ~2150 deaths reported in 22 days on Dec 2 [....] I expect the US to be reporting over 2000 deaths per day in 3 weeks time. Importantly, this doesn't assume any further increases in circulation and is essentially "baked into" currently reported cases and represents conditions that take time to resolve and to be reported.