As the election approaches, U.S. COVID-19 cases rise
100,233 people tested positive for COVID-19 on Friday
The United States documented a grim milestone this week — the 9 millionth case of COVID-19.
According to a Reuters tally of publicly reported data, this number represents nearly 3% of the population and nearly 229,000 individuals have died since the outbreak of the pandemic earlier this year.
The U.S. health authorities confirmed that 100,233 additional people tested positive for COVID-19 on Friday. This tally has now “set a new single-day record in U.S. cases for the fifth time in the past 10 days, surpassing the previous peak of 91,248 new infections posted a day earlier,” according to Reuters.
This new tally is also the world’s highest national single-day case count, exceeding India’s 24-hour record of 97,894 cases in September.
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More than 1,000 people succumbed to the virus on Thursday, the third time the daily death toll surpassed that number in the month of October with at least 926 more fatalities on Friday. The pace of the fatalities is expected to continue increasing.
According to the University of Washington’s updated model, it projects that the death toll – that has held at a monthly pace of over 22,000 — is expected to rise in November and will rise to “a new record of more than 72,000 in January.”
The article sites that: “Among the hard-hit states are those most hotly contested in the campaign between Republican President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden, such as Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.”
In an interview with Reuters, Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University of Public Health in Providence, Rhode Island, called out the country’s lack of adequate testing as cases increase.
“We are having some of the largest outbreaks that we’ve had during the entire pandemic. And nine, 10 months into this pandemic, we are still largely not quite prepared,” Jha said.
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On Twitter, President Trump downplayed the virus, saying for weeks that the country is “rounding the turn” as new cases continue to increase. On October 27, he said, “You won’t be hearing so much about it anymore!”
A CNN investigation found that 14 out of 17 counties they surveyed saw an increase in COVID-19 cases one month after hosting Trump rallies that occurred between August 17 and September 26.
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