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Coronavirus cases in the US rose by 97,000 on Friday, by far the largest increase in a day since the start of the pandemic, and Midwestern states led a wave of infections, hospitalizations and deaths across the country few days before the presidential elections.
The sharp increase, topping Thursday’s record of 88,400, brought the weekly total for the U.S. to 548,000 infections, a record for a seven-day period since the disease began to spread across the country in March, according to the data from the Covid Tracking Project. On average, the country has added more than 78,300 cases per day over the past week.
Friday’s surge was led by the large industrial states of the Midwest, many of which are key battlegrounds for Tuesday’s election. Illinois and Ohio set single-day records with 6,943 and 3,845, respectively. Wisconsin had 5,096 new confirmed cases, its second-highest daily increase, according to the state health department.
The United States attributed 933 more deaths to the coronavirus, bringing the overall count to more than 221,000 since the start of the pandemic, according to the Covid Tracking Project.
Both President Donald Trump and Democratic rival Joe Biden campaigned in the Midwestern states affected by Friday’s outbreak, attacking each other’s plans to deal with the pandemic.
In Wisconsin, which has one of the highest infection rates of any state hit by the fall peak, Trump claimed that Biden would shut down the U.S. economy entirely, a claim the former vice president has repeatedly denied.
“You will have no school, no graduations, no weddings, no Thanksgiving, no Christmas, no July 4, no future,” he said at a rally in Green Bay. “Biden wants to keep everyone locked up.”
Speaking in Iowa, which also posted its biggest one-day increase in cases on Friday with 2,203 infections, Biden accused the president of “waving the white flag” and surrendering to the virus. “The American people don’t give up,” he said at a rally in Des Moines. “We are not cowering; I do not want.”
The seven-day average in the Midwest reached a record 26,869 new cases per day on Friday. Some analysts suggest that states where coronavirus cases are on the rise are causing a drop in support for Trump in recent public opinion polls.
However, it is not the only region where cases increased during the past week. As of Friday, the seven-day average of cases in 46 states and the District of Columbia was higher than a week ago, according to the Financial Times analysis of data from the Covid Tracking Project. Hawaii is the only place in the US averaging seven days below where it was four weeks ago.
In mostly rural western states like Montana, South Dakota and North Dakota, cases have skyrocketed the most in recent days, while they are also on the rise again in east coast states like New Jersey and Pennsylvania. who were the most affected by the pandemic in its first months. .
New York this week hit the half-million mark and Florida became the third state to surpass 800,000 infections on Friday, providing a potential warning that some large states have had their multi-month efforts to “flatten the curve “freeze or disappear. backwards.
Seven-day average case rates in the most populous states of California and Texas increased 29% and 53%, respectively, over the past four weeks, while Arizona’s has more than doubled. During the same period, the level of hospitalizations in Texas has increased by 74 percent and by 54 percent in Arizona, although it has decreased by 1 percent in California.
More than half of all US states are on track to record their highest monthly case volume in October. That has brought the total number of confirmed infections nationwide this month to 1.75 million, currently only exceeded by the 1.9 million cases added in July. Overall, the US has recorded nearly 9 million cases since the pandemic began.
October is also on track to be the deadliest month for at least 14 states, beating the previous record for 12 states in May.
While part of the increase in cases can be explained by increased testing capacity at the national level, and improved awareness and preparedness for the disease have helped keep mortality rates lower than during the early stages of the crisis , hospitalizations have shown a worrying upward trend.
The number of people currently in U.S. hospitals with coronavirus reached 46,688, the highest since mid-August. A record 47 states and Washington DC now have higher levels of hospitalizations than four weeks ago, threatening to drain resources.
Anthony Fauci, America’s leading infectious disease expert and a leading member of the White House coronavirus task force, said in a CNBC interview earlier this week that there was a “large amount” of states that “they were going in the wrong direction.”
“This is going to get worse because we go further into a colder season, as we move through the fall and winter with the Christmas season, we have to do something different,” he said. “We cannot let this happen. We are going to have many more hospitalizations and that will inevitably lead to more deaths. So this is an untenable situation. “
Swamp notes
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