
ATLANTA—Admitting that she was caught off guard by the resurgent threat, CDC director Rochelle Wolensky expressed alarm Wednesday after Googling “Covid cases” for the first time in weeks. “Holy shit, I haven’t been checking in on the coronavirus because I thought we’d turned a corner, but damn, this looks really bad,” said Wolensky, holding up her phone for the press to show the rapidly escalating graphs of caseloads and deaths displayed on the search engine before asking if anyone else had seen this. “And the more I’m looking at this, does the Johnson & Johnson one have a different effect on the delta variant than the mRNA ones? Jesus, I see why I’ve been avoiding it now. This is just super depressing.” Wolensky added that she would probably ignore hospitalization data for the next month and hope things leveled off before her upcoming vacation to Hawaii.