Texas joined California, Florida and New York in a group on Friday that no state wants to be a part of: those with 300,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus.
The Lone Star State broke its one-day record to overshadow that horrible benchmark, reporting 14,780 new cases on Friday, the latest NBC News count showed.
That new number came after the United States set a one-day record for new cases with 72,878.
New York, which was the nation’s hot spot in April and appears to have successfully flattened the curve, still leads the nation with 410,783 cases. But NBC News has calculated that Texas, Florida and California could be ahead of the Empire State Building in late July if the current trend continues.
Since the pandemic began, Texas, a state led by a Republican governor who began reopening at the behest of President Donald Trump even as the number of new cases increased, has recorded 311,043 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 3,735 deaths. Figures shown.
Governor Greg Abbott in recent weeks began ordering the use of masks to curb the spread of the coronavirus and, along with the Florida governor, hit bars that appeared to be a major cause of the increasingly young victims who contracted it.
Austin Mayor Steve Adler said Trump and Abbott mistakenly downplayed the dangers of the pandemic and the effectiveness of wearing face masks to slow the spread.
“The message coming out of Washington and from my governor very early in the process was that it was not important, it was not necessary,” Adler said on CNN. “Then our governor began supporting the masking, but did not make it mandatory. That sends a confusing message. If only recommended but not required, is it really important?
While Abbott now regularly wears a mask in public, this past weekend was the first time that Trump had.
Trump’s reluctance to adopt a strategy that the vast majority of medical experts say is key to curbing the spread of the coronavirus has sown confusion among his supporters and has made wearing a mask a test of loyalty.
Utah, where dozens of defiant Trump supporters crashed Wednesday at a county board meeting to protest a proposed mandate to wear masks, set a record Thursday for new cases with 954, NBC News figures showed.
Nearby Nevada also set a new daily record Thursday with 1,447 new cases.
In other developments:
- With new poll numbers showing that most Americans disapprove of the way Trump has handled the COVID-19 crisis, key members of his administration and re-election campaign rushed to his defense. “This president has taken bold and decisive action from the start,” said campaign senior adviser Mercedes Schlapp. White House adviser Kellyanne Conway said Trump “has done a solid job guiding us through him.” But earlier this month, Trump was still insisting that the pandemic “just go away.” And from the start, Trump has regularly downplayed the dangers of a plague that killed nearly 140,000 Americans and destroyed the thriving economy that he inherited from his predecessor.
- Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf, a Democrat, followed through on his threat and got $ 13 million in COVID-19 federal aid from Lebanon County after local Republican leaders voted in mid-May to reopen the county in defiance of Wolf’s orders. . “Don’t come in and say you want something from the state when you haven’t followed the rules,” Wolf said Thursday. “There are consequences. These are the consequences.” Rep. Dan Meuser, a Republican whose district includes the county, said Wolf lacked the legal authority to withhold aid money.
Two days ago, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, a Republican and Trump ally who also recently started wearing a mask, banned more than a dozen local governments from forcing them. And when Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, a Democrat who tested positive for COVID-19, said she would not comply with the ban, Kemp sued her and the Atlanta City Council Thursday.
“A better use for taxpayer money would be to expand testing and contact tracking,” Bottoms said. “If being sued by the state is what it takes to save lives in Atlanta, then we’ll see them in court.”
Republican Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia insisted Friday that this dispute “is not about people who don’t wear masks.”
“What Mayor Bottoms is doing is auditioning for the vice president,” Collins said on Fox News.
Bottoms, one of several prominent Democratic leaders that Joe Biden has been investigating to be his running mate, told Stephanie Ruhle of MSNBC later on Friday that Kemp is “putting politics on the people.”
“It is amazing that this governor, who did not know that this virus was asymptomatic until we were well in the pandemic, would waste resources on suing me personally and our municipal council for a mask mandate,” said Bottoms.
Kemp admitted in April that he had just learned that asymptomatic people could spread COVID-19, despite health experts having warned of the possibility since January.
