The U.S is seeing a dramatic rise in the daily new coronavirus cases, which surged to their highest level since late July, gradually gearing towards numbers seen only during the outbreak’s peak.
According to data by John Hopkins University, the United States has reported more than 69,000 new coronavirus cases on Friday, bringing the country’s total count to over 8 million reported cases.
“When we saw this kind of transmission earlier in the pandemic, in March and April, the virus hadn’t seeded everywhere. This surge has the potential to be way worse than it was than either the spring or the summer,” Detroit’s former health director, El- Sayed said.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, U.S’ leading infectious disease expert said “You can’t enter into the cool months of the fall and the cold months of the winter with a high community infection baseline,”. The positivity rate, he continued, or the percentage of tests that are positive, is “going in the wrong direction” in more than 30 states.
The highest single daily case count was two weeks earlier, when confirmed infections hit more than 77,000.
As per research by John Hopkins University, ten states Friday reported their highest one-day case counts: Colorado, Idaho, Indiana, Minnesota, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming.
California reported its biggest daily jump in coronavirus deaths in a week and an increase in new cases that kept around its average of the past seven days. A further 118 fatalities were attributed to coronavirus, more than doubling from 58 on Wednesday.
Daily US case averages had lowered to around 34,300 by September. However, now, the country is averaging more than 55,000 new cases daily over the past week — up more than 60% since mid-September’s fall.
New weekly cases have not dropped below 250,000 since June.
On Friday Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health said “This is a good moment for people to stop and ask themselves, ‘What can I do to try to be sure that we limit the further infections that otherwise seem to be looming in front of us as cold weather is kicking in and people are indoors, and those curves are going upward, in the wrong direction?’ ”
The COVID Tracking Project, a volunteer-run organisation to track coronavirus in the United States. reports that hospital admissions and deaths also are trending upward. More than 37,000 people were admitted to hospital for the coronavirus on Friday.
