One in five new coronavirus cases reported worldwide came from just three states in the United States: Florida, Texas and California, a new NBC News count revealed Tuesday.
The 27,574 cases registered in those states represented 18.9 percent of the global total and represented more than a third of the 61,751 new cases reported in the United States.
Meanwhile, the total of deaths in two weeks in Texas increased 99 percent in the previous two weeks.
In Florida, the total number of deaths in two weeks increased by almost 84 percent and in California it increased by almost 27 percent.
As of Tuesday morning, there were 3,386,164 confirmed cases of coronavirus in the US, and the death toll was 136,472.
The Hispanic community in Texas has been especially affected lately, and Rep. Joaquin Castro, a Democrat whose district includes the city of San Antonio, blamed President Donald Trump and Texas Governor Greg Abbott for being “slow to evaluate people, slow to track the infection and slow to treat people. “
“They tried to pretend it wasn’t a big problem because they didn’t want to end up on the news every day like New York did, and that had an incredible effect on this community, and in the last three weeks, it really blew up,” Castro told Garrett Haake of MSBNC.
Trump and Abbott have been accused of failing to move fast enough to fight the coronavirus, and it wasn’t until this month that the Texas governor ordered to wear a mask in public. Trump wore a mask for the first time in public just two days ago, and earlier this month he predicted the pandemic would “just go away.”
The staggering new sums came the same day that Admiral Brett Giroir, undersecretary of health, insisted “Today” that “we are turning the current outbreak around.”
“We are all very concerned about the outbreak,” said Giroir. “About half of the cases are in four states, Texas, California, Florida and Arizona. But we are in a very different place now than several months ago, a much better place. “
Perhaps. But 41 states have seen an increase in cases in the past two weeks and eight states have seen an increase of more than 100 percent in the past 14 days, according to the NBC News Medical Unit.
And when Vice President Mike Pence arrived in Louisiana on Tuesday to meet with local officials about the pandemic, Attorney General Mike Landry was not there to greet him on the runway because he tested positive, local media reported.
“Due to over-caution with the Vice President’s arrival in our state, I was tested for Cornavirus,” Landry wrote in an email to employees. “Although I had no symptoms, I had positive results for COVID-19.”
In other developments:
- US Representative Morgan Griffith, a Republican from Virginia and a member of the conservative Freedom Caucus, announced that he tested positive for the coronavirus. Her diagnosis came five days after she and other members of the caucus appeared at a press conference where they emphasized the need to reopen schools in the fall despite the pandemic. While Griffith was bringing a mask, an NBC News producer who was there noticed that Griffith wasn’t wearing it much.
- Maryland Governor Larry Hogan has warned he would close bars and restaurants that do not meet social distancing requirements or insist that customers wear a face mask while inside. “The vast majority of bars and restaurants in our state and in compliance, but some flagrantly violate the law and endanger public health,” wrote Hogan. Republican, Hogan has received high praise for taking decisive action, long before the White House acted, to stop the spread of the coronavirus in his state.
- The National Center for Assisted Living, which represents the nursing home industry, warned that the increase in new COVID-19 cases could “lead to a dramatic increase in cases in long-term facilities.” In a letter to the National Association of Governors, the group said speeding up testing is key to preventing another calamity.
“The amount of time it takes to receive test results is affecting the facility’s long-term ability to fight the virus,” the letter said. “For nursing homes and assisted living communities to protect residents and staff, we need on-site testing with reliable and rapid results.
There was also a pinch of troubling news from New York, a state that published Texas-sized case numbers in April and has since managed to crush the coronavirus curve.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo reported that 1.5 percent of the 60,045 COVID-19 tests conducted Monday returned positive results. That’s the highest positive rate in the state since June 5.
Cuomo also reported five other coronavirus deaths on Monday.
Two days earlier, the New York State Department of Health reported that there were zero deaths from COVID-19 on Saturday, the first time it happened since March 13.
