Cases of a Drug-Resistant Fungus Tripled during the COVID Pandemic

As the U.S. health care system weathered blow after blow of the COVID pandemic, diseases of all kinds, from HIV to congenital syphilis, surged across the country. Last week a national survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that outbreaks of emerging drug-resistant fungi also grew at an “alarming” rate in hospitals from 2019 to 2020.

Annual cases of the opportunistic, hard-to-treat yeast Candida auris nearly tripled from 476 in 2019 to 1,471 in 2021, according to the CDC’s recent report, which was published in Annals of Internal Medicine. Infectious disease experts...