- The latest coronavirus update showing where the US stands at this point in the pandemic is perhaps the most ominous one yet.
- The US has now set a truly frightening coronavirus record, having passed 120,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in a single day on Thursday.
- For this and other reasons, it seems that White House health advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci was right that winter would be a tough time for the US.
The coronavirus updates have been coming fast and furious as the week draws to a close, and while everyone’s attention is still focused on the outcome of Election Day 2020, the latest updates are equally deserving of attention — for all the wrong reasons.
For starters, remember all those dire predictions from White House health advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci, about how this winter was going to be truly terrible and that COVID-19 would be spreading like wildfire more than ever? The US notched a stunningly bad coronavirus record on Thursday, when we passed the 120,000 mark in terms of the number of new cases that day. That’s up from 107,872 new infections on Wednesday, according to a New York Times tracker, and at least 1,616 Americans also died from the deadly pathogen.
Moreover, in the past week, the US has averaged 91,878 cases a day — up 51% from two weeks ago. That brings our cumulative totals to-date to more than 9.6 million coronavirus cases in the US since the start of the pandemic, according to Johns Hopkins University, as well as more than 235,000 deaths.
As of the time of this writing, there’s also a record number of Americans currently hospitalized on account of the virus. According to the COVID Tracking Project, the US has the largest number of Americans hospitalized because of the virus since early August — 52,049, to be exact.
Before we get too much farther along, it’s also worth pointing out another fact here. As of the time of this writing, the most important race from Election Day 2020 still has not been called. As of Friday morning, it’s looking like former Vice President Joe Biden will be the 46th president of the United States — but he won’t necessarily have ridden a wave of discontent over Trump’s coronavirus response into office.
On the contrary, the latest vote tally shows that President Trump still managed to amass support from almost 70 million Americans. What’s more, an Associated Press analysis shows that of the 376 counties with the highest number of coronavirus cases per capita, a whopping 93% of those voted for Trump.
“Now is the time to develop a testing strategy to maximize our ability to identify the silent epidemic of asymptomatic COVID-19 infections,” Dr. Robert Redfied, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a tweet Wednesday. Which, when you think about it, begs the question of why such a thing wasn’t in place some 10 months ago, given how terrible things continue to be in the US.