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At least 125,596 new cases of coronavirus were recorded on Friday, the highest report in a single day since the pandemic began. It also marked the third day in a row that the country has surpassed 100,000 daily cases of coronavirus.
In addition to the new case numbers, by Friday night there were at least 1,137 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University.
Officials across the country warn that hospitals could soon run out of capacity. And more hospitalizations and people in intensive care could also lead to an increase in deaths.
Harvard University epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch warned Friday that coronavirus infections could double over the next month. And a joint forecast from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention projects that another 31,000 people could lose their lives in the next two and a half weeks.
States are posting record numbers
Thirteen states reported their highest number of new cases Thursday, according to Johns Hopkins: Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah and West Virginia.
And at least 38 states are reporting more new infections than the previous week. Only two states, Alabama and Tennessee, are trending in the right direction.
Hospitals are reaching capacity
Sixteen states reported record hospitalizations for Covid-19 on Friday, according to the Covid Tracking Project.
Those states are: Alaska, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, Utah, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
In Kansas City, hospitals are reaching capacity due to stress from Covid-19, authorities say.
The medical directors of seven hospital systems told reporters that the city’s hospitals could be overwhelmed in a matter of weeks. They said hospitalizations in the region were at their highest levels since the pandemic began.
One of the main concerns, they added, is that there will not be enough staff in hospitals to help patients with the virus.
“Covid is the leading admission diagnosis” at the University of Kansas, said Dr. Steven Stites, chief medical officer of the University of Kansas Health System.
Meanwhile, the Colorado Department of Health and Environment said Friday that the newer model for Covid-19 indicates that state hospitalizations are increasing more dramatically than last week’s projections.
The state has reached its highest number of Covid-19 hospitalizations to date, surpassing its peak in April, the department said in a press release.
“Keeping hospitals at or below demand capacity will require substantial and rapid action to prevent transmission,” according to the statement.
New state restrictions include curfews
As the situation across the country worsens, state and local officials are taking new steps to prevent the spread of the virus, despite the fatigue many feel.
Officials in Rhode Island, Oregon, and Denver, for example, recommend nighttime curfews.
On Friday, Denver officials announced a 10 p.m. curfew for non-exempt residents and businesses, a last-ditch effort to curb a surge in cases and prevent another stay-at-home order across the city.
The curfew, which Mayor Michael Hancock called “Home by Order of 10,” goes into effect Sunday and will last 30 days. It differs slightly from a traditional curfew because it came from the city’s health department rather than the mayor’s office.
That means public health officials will enforce the order rather than enforce the law.
Oregon Gov. Kate Brown called on some counties to take a two-week “social break” as the state reported a record 805 new cases on Friday.
The “social break” limits indoor social gatherings to individual households or a maximum of 6 people, and limits indoor recreational spaces such as gyms and museums to 50 people. Restaurants should limit capacity to 50 people with a maximum group size of six people seated together.
Beginning Nov. 11, counties that are registering 200 cases per 100,000 residents over a two-week period will have to follow the “social pause,” Brown said.
“This is a wake-up call,” he said. “I don’t want to have to take any more steps to stop the spread of COVID-19, because I know it will have a devastating impact on our businesses, both large and small, but I absolutely will.”
Gatherings such as house parties have been the main source of the spread of the virus in the state, the governor added. And if they don’t stop, he said, “I’ll be back in two weeks with a closing order.”
Social distancing earlier could have prevented 59,000 deaths
More than 1 million cases of Covid-19 in the US and more than 59,000 deaths could have been avoided by early May if mitigation measures had been implemented two weeks earlier, according to a modeling study published Friday in Science Advances.
Sen Pei, a research scientist at Columbia University, and his colleagues built a Covid-19 transmission model that analyzed every county in the US from February 21 to May 3.
Comprehensive measures to control coronavirus transmission were announced on March 15, the researchers wrote. But if interventions like social distancing and business closures had started a week earlier, on March 8, there would have been 600,000 fewer confirmed cases and 32,000 fewer deaths.
If those interventions started two weeks earlier, on March 1, there would have been more than a million fewer confirmed cases and more than 59,000 fewer deaths, the authors found.
CNN’s Amanda Watts, Ben Tinker, Haley Brink, Sheena Jones, Jamie Gumbrecht, Jen Selva, Melissa Alonso, Lucy Kafanov, Laurie Ure, and Kay Jones contributed to this report.
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