The U.S. recorded the highest number of COVID-19 deaths in two weeks, a new NBC News report showed Thursday, but extensive testing shortages have made sure the numbers coming from the hardest-hitting states may not be a true picture of these deadly are pandemic.
The 1,424 deaths reported Wednesday were the highest since July 28, when 2,218 deaths were reported, the figures show. And it was the twelfth time in the last 16 days that the death toll was more than 1,000.
Most of these deaths were in the southern and Sun Belt states such as Florida, Texas and Arizona which resumed in May and June at the urging of President Donald Trump despite warnings from public health experts that the coronavirus was beginning to take root. .
“The deaths we see today are a result of infections four to eight weeks ago,” Admiral Brett Giroir, the assistant secretary of health and test coordinator of the Trump administration, said Thursday in a call with reporters .
“Mortality is a backward indicator,” Giroir added. “I do not mean to minimize people who die, but mortality is a lagging indicator and it will take a week or two before we see it go down in a significant way.”
The bizarre new numbers came on the same day that a slump of hope arose that the economy may have begun to multiply from the biggest collapse since the Great Depression – for the first time in almost five months, weekly employment initiatives fell below one million.
“There is no doubt that the outbreak of hotspots in the South and West is likely to slow down the recovery,” Larry Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council, told CNBC.
Still, Kudlow said, the new 963,000 unemployed claim figure was “a good sign.”
However, experts said it was difficult to measure the progress of the pandemic because fewer people are being tested and some states are slow to report test results.
“I really believe we are entering a real, new, emerging crisis with testing, and it makes it hard to know where the pandemic is slower and where it is not,” Drs. Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Health Institute, told CNBC on Wednesday.
However, Giroir insists that the number of new COVID-19 cases is declining and the rate of hospitalizations is also declining. He said the administration expects to have the capacity to do nearly 90 million tests a month by September, but they probably won’t have to do as many tests.
“It’s just a false statement that we need millions of tests,” the admiral said. “You need strategic testing, carried out with smart policies. That’s the plan, that plan is being implemented, and that plan is working.”
Trump has pushed hard to get kids back in class. “We need to open our schools and open our businesses,” the president said at a White House news conference on Wednesday.
But public health experts have warned that opening schools without adequate testing – and at a time when too many people are not wearing masks or exercising social distances – could add jet fuel to the pandemic.
And new data shows “a rising rise in children and teens diagnosed with COVID-19,” NBC News reported Thursday.
“The pediatric cases are in the same states that we know too much about adults who have the disease,” said Dr. Jodie Dionne-Odom, an assistant professor of medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of Alabama in Birmingham.
As of Thursday morning, the U.S. has reported more than 167,000 deaths due to COVID-19 and more than 5.2 million confirmed infections. The U.S. has accounted for a quarter of the world’s more than 20.7 million cases and 750,429 deaths.
- Joe Biden renewed his call for a nationwide mask mandate to stop the spread of the covorna virus. “Every governor must wear a mask,” said the Democratic presidential candidate. “Experts estimate that it will save more than 40,000 lives in the next three months.” But many Republican administrators, especially those who work closely with Trump, are reluctant to demand face-to-face coverage. And Trump himself has only recently begun wearing masks in public. Yet top members of his administration have strongly urged the Americans to donate to them. “We want to wear 80-90 percent masks in public,” Giroir said Thursday. “When you walk alone in the woods, you do not need a mask. But when you walk people wear a mask.”
- Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which has endured an attempt by the White House, had an answer ready when asked how much longer Americans should wear masks and fight the pandemic . “How long we have to do this depends entirely on us,” Fauci said during a National Geographic interview. “If we continue to run away from the reality of the need to do so, it can persist and drag on.” Fauci has lured Trump’s ore – and even death threats from some of his supporters – to the opposite of the Pink predictions made by the president about the progress of the pandemic. Asked about the threats, Fauci said “it is a reflection of the division in the country.”
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People in New York died of COVID-19 at the start of the pandemic, about the same rate as they did of the Spanish flu back in 1918, according to a new study published in JAMA Network Open. Researchers focused on two periods of 61 days: March 11 though May 11 this year and the 61 days of October and November 1918, when the impact of flu was at its peak. The study found that during the peak of the 1918 pandemic, 287 per 100,000 New Yorkers died per month, while before this year’s pandemic, 202 per 100,000 New Yorkers per month died. The Spanish flu, which got its nickname when King Alfonso XIII of Spain contracted and survived it, killed approximately 50 million worldwide and 675,000 in the US alone. New York has, since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, been able to flatten the curve.
- Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear asked school districts in his state not to defy his order to delay instruction in person until September 28, as the number of cases of coronavirus continues to climb. “While we are desperate to get our kids back, I also want it to work,” he said. Kentucky registered 1,163 new cases Wednesday, including 39 in children under five.
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The pandemic is thought to have spread across the world from Wuhan, China. But now Chinese officials are afraid that the virus could return to their country through frozen food shipments from countries such as Brazil and Ecuador, where the plague is smelling. Inspectors in three Chinese cities have reported that COVID-19 has been discovered over imported frozen food over the span of four days.
Joe Murphy and Nigel Chiwaya contributed.
