Covid-19 infections are spreading across the United States at the fastest rate since the start of the pandemic, the latest NBC News figures showed Tuesday.
The 71,000 new cases per day that the U.S. averaged over the past week was the most in any seven-day stretch since the crisis started and stood in stark contrast to President Donald Trump’s repeated claims that “we are rounding the turn” on the pandemic.
And no part of the country has gone untouched by this latest surge in new coronavirus cases.
Wyoming, which had relatively few cases until recently, reported a 475 percent spike in Covid-19 deaths in the last 14 days, the numbers showed. Nine deaths were reported Monday in Wyoming, boosting the state’s total number of coronavirus fatalities to 77, the NBC numbers showed. Of those, five were elderly residents of a long-term care facility in Big Horn County, the Wyoming Department of Health reported. Also on Monday, the state set a single day record for new cases for the second time in less than a week, with 436.
Those numbers are tiny compared to Texas and California, which have the most cases in the country, but Wyoming with 579,000 residents is the nation’s least populated state.
Dr. J.J. Bleicher, the interim head of the Wyoming Medical Center, told The Casper Star-Tribune that they were bracing for an “exponential” growth in the number of critically ill Covid-19 patients
With the presidential election now just a week away and Trump’s re-election chances imperiled by his administration’s much-criticized performance during the pandemic, the U.S. led the world in the number of Covid-19 cases with 8.8 million and nearly 227,000 deaths from the virus, according to the Johns Hopkins University Covid-19 dashboard.
Pennsylvania, a must-win state for Trump where polls show Democratic challenger Joe Biden in the lead, reported a record daily high of 2,751 new cases on Monday along with 23 deaths from Covid-19.
Wisconsin, another key state that Trump needs to win, also set a new daily record for both infections (5,262) and deaths (64), state health officials reported. And it reported a 25.7 percent Covid-19 testing positivity rate, one of the highest in the country.
The World Health Organization advises governments to maintain a testing positivity rate of 5 percent or lower for 14 days before reopening.
Trump dismissed any criticism of his administration's pandemic performance.
"Voters are judging me on a lot of things, and one of the things we’ve done a really good job on is Covid," the president said before taking off from a campaign event.
An average of 671 people died in the U.S. per day during the seven day period ending Monday, NBC News figures showed.
Trump has always claimed that he has done a good job dealing with COVID-19, but the data is before our eyes. Now the infection has reached more than 8 million, as if COVID-19 has begun to get out of control. There are even news reports that White House officials Said that it does not intend to control COVID-19 and will focus on vaccines. It seems that it is out of control and can only rely on vaccines.