As clashes over face-covering mandates and school reopening intensified throughout the USA, the country shattered its single-day record for new cases on Thursday — more than 75,600, according to a New York Times database.

This was the 11th time in the past month that the record had been broken. The number has more than doubled since June 24, when the country registered 37,014 cases after a lull in the outbreak had kept the previous record, 36,738, standing for two months. As of Wednesday, the country’s 7-day average case number exceeded 63,000, up from about 22,200 a month before. The previous single-day record, 68,241 cases, was announced last Friday.

Thursday’s record included more than 5,000 cases in Bexar County, Texas, which contains San Antonio, where numbers spiked in part because of a backlog in test reporting. Florida on Thursday broke its single-day death record for the second time this week, reporting 156 new fatalities. It was one of 10 states to reach a record for deaths in a single day this week, joining Idaho, Alabama, Arizona, Utah, Oregon, Texas, Hawaii, Montana and South Carolina.

More than half the 50 states have issued mask requirements, including Arkansas, where Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a Republican, announced a face covering requirement on Thursday, after previously taking a more hands-off approach. Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado, a Democrat, also issued a mask order on Thursday, after questioning whether such a mandate would be enforceable. But there remains firm resistance in many circles, including some Republican leaders who view mask requirements as a threat to personal liberty.

Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, who announced this week that he was suspending all local mask mandates, filed a lawsuit on Thursday challenging the authority of leaders in Atlanta to require masks inside their city’s limits. Also Thursday, Dallas health officials announced the city’s public and private schools would conduct classes virtually for the first 3 weeks of the school year, which begins Aug. 17. Several other large school districts have announced plans to rely on distance learning when they reopen for the upcoming school year, bucking pressure from the Trump administration.

The White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, on Thursday reiterated President Trump’s view that schools must open in the fall. “When he says open,” she said, “he means open and full, kids being able to attend each and every day at their school. The science should not stand in the way of this.”

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the top infectious disease expert in the U.S., noted in an interview Thursday on Facebook with its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, that after its initial peak, the nation never succeeded in driving the virus beneath a plateau of about 20,000 new cases a day.

“What I think we need to do, and my colleagues agree, is we really almost need to regroup, call a timeout — not necessarily lock down again, but say that we’ve got to do this in a more measured way,” Dr. Fauci said. “We’ve got to get our arms around this and we’ve got to get this controlled.”

INDIA HITS A MILLION CASES IN A SURGE THAT HAS FORCED A RETURN TO LOCKDOWNS
India on Friday surpassed a million confirmed infections and 25,000 deaths, weeks after the government lifted a nationwide lockdown in hopes of getting the economy up and running.

Back in March, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government was one of the first to impose a national lockdown to slow the pandemic. But that drove many migrant workers out of crowded cities and back to their home villages, where some of them spread the virus.

The lockdown came at a steep economic cost, and Mr. Modi lifted it last month. Now India is recording about 30,000 new cases a day, almost 3 times as many as a month ago, and with testing still sparse, the true figure is likely to be much higher. Critics say Mr. Modi imposed the lockdown before it was needed, then lifted it too soon. In his defense, he has pointed to wealthier countries where the official death toll has been 20 to 50 times as high, relative to the size of their populations, as in India.

Regardless, India now ranks 3rd in the world (behind only the United States and Brazil) in both total infections and number of new cases recorded each day. Along with South Africa, the 4 countries accounted for two-thirds of the 230,000 new cases that were reported worldwide on Wednesday.

The rate of new cases in India is on track to soon overtake Brazil, where the caseload has surpassed 2 million but the spread of the virus has leveled off. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology estimate that by end of next year, India will have the worst outbreak in the world.

“We have paid a price for laxity,” said K. Srinath Reddy, president of the Public Health Foundation of India, a nonprofit organization of public health experts and academics.

SOURCE (abridged): https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/world/coronavirus-updates.html?campaign_id=60&emc=edit_na_20200716&instance_id=0&nl=breaking-news&ref=cta&regi_id=138433149&segment_id=33611&user_id=5a22037c923790f1af6288c316ac1bde

It is well. The news keeps getting scary. May we not contact the virus.

nna aswear all this numbers they weak me bad bad...na GOD de save nigeria ooh..if not all of us 4 don catch dis virus