Coronavirus arrived like a stone thrown into a still pond. Out from this impact surged a first wave, a tsunami of infections that subsumed countries as it spread. Behind it, as many had predicted, has come the second wave, almost exactly six months later.
But just as with a stone in a pond, this ripple does not match up to the first. Of all the statistical comparisons between the waves, two from hospitals exemplify the trends that matter. One is a graph going up, and the other a graph going down.
The first, the graph that is going up, shows how fast hospital beds are filling. Between March 1 and April 1, the number of covid patients entering hospital went from 0 a day to