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Hi everyone, this is John Mandrola from the Heart.org Medscape Cardiology and this is this week in

Cardiology for July 17th, 2020.

This week, COVID, the Excel trial, atrial for relation, and pacemakers.

First, a brief COVID update, and the short story is simple.

America is in a hot mess. Not only pandemic wise, but here I'll just

stick with the medical issues. Testing is much more available but multiple cities and states are seeing increases in COVID.

70,000 new cases in one day this week, a record.

As expected, hospitalizations are increasing and the early data looks like deaths are

tracking up as well. The US now has 3.6 million cases of COVID and I saw this

week that in Arizona one in four people tested are positive

one in four the US deaths two weeks ago were 135,000 and this week they were 141,000. That rate of rise of only 1.04X is flat, but the

flat line belies the focal nature of this pandemic.

Florida, Arizona, California, and Texas all show clear signals of increasing rates of hospitalizations and deaths.

Another problem we have is inconsistent reporting. We don't seem to have a central repository of data.

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