US COVID cases are now more than 71,600 as of Thursday as hospitalizations rise and outbreaks take place in the Midwest.
Jay Butler, the CDC’s deputy director for infectious diseases, said that US COVID cases are now growing “really in all parts of the country,” with high transmission rates across the Midwest.
“Unfortunately, we are seeing a distressing trend here in the United States,” Butler told reporters on a call. The spike in infections is caused by cooler temperatures as the country approaches the fall, he explained, stressing that “smaller, more intimate gatherings of family, friends, and neighbors may be driving transmission as well, especially as they move indoors.”
Coronavirus infections rose by 5% or more over the past week in 38 states as of Thursday, based on a CNBC analysis of data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. Figures show the US is now averaging about 61,100 new COVID-19 cases daily.
“The pandemic is not over. Here in the United States, we’re approaching a critical phase,” Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said on Wednesday.
COVID-19 testing
Some consider the increase in COVID-19 testing as the cause of the increase in cases. Cases have risen at a much faster pace than testing. Data from the Covid Tracking Project, an independent volunteer organization run by journalists at The Atlantic, revealed that the US held more than 1.1 million tests on Thursday and a record 1.2 million tests on Monday.
COVID-19 testing has risen by about 11%. That compares with a 46% increase in the average daily rate of new illnesses over that same period, from about 42,000 per day to more than 60,000, according to Johns Hopkins data.
Health experts and infectious diseases specialists like White House health advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci have previously expressed their concerns about how the increasing Covid-19 cases could impact the country's response to the pandemic as it enters the end of the year.
“If steps are not taken to reduce transmission at the community level, it’ll come to no surprise that health-care systems start to feel a pinch and start to head towards capacity and beyond capacity,” Dr. Isaac Bogoch, an infectious disease specialist and professor at the University of Toronto, told CNBC in a recent interview.
Coronavirus hospitalizations
Coronavirus hospitalizations have been increasing as well. This trend worries health experts because it reflects the severity of an outbreak; figures on hospitalizations do not count asymptomatic cases. The Covid Tracking Project shows that over 40,000 COVID patients are currently in the hospital in the US.
On a weekly average, many of states with record high hospitalizations are in the West and Midwest, including Nebraska, Iowa, North Dakota, Ohio, Montana, Oklahoma, Utah, Wisconsin, South Dakota, and Wyoming, according to a CNBC analysis of Covid Tracking Project data.
President Donald Trump was as optimistic as ever, saying the U.S. is “rounding the corner” in the outbreak.
“I don’t think we’re going to have a dark winter at all,” Trump said. “We’re opening up our country, we’ve learned and studied and understand the disease, which we didn’t at the beginning.”
