The Pandemic Fueled a Superbug Surge. Can Medicine Recover?

The desperate need to save the lives of Covid patients during the pandemic’s first waves, coupled with shortages of hospital personnel and protective equipment, drove a shocking reversal in progress against deadly superbugs, according to a new analysis by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The report, released July 12, synthesizes lab and hospital-admission data to reach a grim conclusion: From 2019 through 2020, the number of antibiotic-resistant infections occurring in hospitals, and resulting deaths, each increased by at least 15 percent. For some of the most hard-to-treat pathogens, the increases shot up 26 percent to 78 percent. And those figures are even worse than they appear, because in the years immediately preceding the pandemic, resistant infections in hospitals across the US had been forced down by almost a third—meaning that Covid wiped out years of progress in reducing one of health care’s most stubborn threats to patients.