Good morning. I'm James Holman from the Washington Post and this is the Daily

202 for Monday, November 30th. In today's news, Joe Biden will need a walking boot for several weeks after slipping while playing with his dog.

The President-elect hires an all-female senior communications team.

And the Wisconsin recount ends up adding to

Biden's margin victory. But first, the big idea.

This morning at least 95,000 Americans are hospitalized with the coronavirus, roughly one in five of all hospitalized people today have COVID.

These numbers are about to get worse because so many people traveled over Thanksgiving.

Let me focus today on how one hospital is trying to deal with the surge.

For two days the week before last,

the Mayo Clinic allowed our medical writer

Lenny Bernstein to embed with doctors

inside one of its hospitals in O' Clair, Wisconsin,

as it coped with the staggering consequences of the contagion.

As the pandemic swelter on the 160-bed hospital,

the day dawned auspiciously. Two precious beds for new patients had opened overnight.

At the morning bed meeting, prospects for a third looked promising.

Better yet, by mid-morning, there were no patients in the emergency department, none.

Even in normal times, a medium-sized hospital like that can go months without ever reaching

zero in the ER. Everyone knew better than to trust their good fortune. And they were right. From 9 a.m. to 10 a.m.

seven patients arrived in the emergency room. 14 descended in the hour after that. Then 10 more in the hour after that. A third had signs of COVID. But there was

also the man who had smashed his fingers with a hammer, the unresponsive woman who had

to be resuscitated, the guy who injured his elbow, someone with

...