In a grim milestone, the total number of covid-19 cases in the United States surpassed 20 million-mark on Friday, as per the data updated by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University. As on date, the country’s Covid-19 case count stands at 20,007,149,
The United States have seen a rapid surge in daily cases since Thanksgiving with 78,000 people suffering virus related deaths in December alone. Notably, the US is the only country to record over 3,000 daily deaths due to the covid-19 pandemic. On Wednesday alone, more than 3,900 people died of Covid-19 in the US, a new daily record. So far, 346,408 people have died of the novel virus which is one out of every 950 US residents.
California has logged in 2,297,336 cases, followed by Texas with 1,766,791 cases and Florida with 1,323,315 cases. The states of New York and Illinois both registered more than 960,000 cases, since the virus first emerged in China’s Wuhan city, as per the data revealed by CSSE.
Ohio, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, North Carolina, Michigan, Wisconsin and Arizona are the other states to record over 520,000 cases.
The United States is the worst hit nation by the pandemic and the experts believe that the worst is yet to come as hospitals gear remain flooded with patients post the holiday season.
According to The Covid Tracking Project, currently, there are more than 125,000 COVID-19 patients in U.S. hospitals, up 25% in the last month.
The recent months saw the worst spike in number of daily cases with country reporting over 10 million cases in October and November. US Covid-19 cases reached 10 million on November 9.
Meanwhile, the United States has approved two vaccines — Pfizer/BioNtech and Moderna– for emergency use authorisation(EUA). It’s been over two weeks since the country started rolling out the vaccine in the market. In the first phase, the country is currently vaccinating healthcare workers, frontline workers and people aged above 60 or with comorbidities.
In a bid to instill trust among Americans, many US dignitaries have received the vaccine against coronavirus. President-elect Joe Biden, Vice-president Kamala Harris, Vice President Mike Pence and top scientist Anthony Fauci were administered the vaccine on live television.