Coronavirus cases are rising in 79% of US states and territories – with the steepest increases in the Mountain West, CDC director warns
- CDC director Dr Robert Redfield warned that 79% of US jurisdictions are now seeing increases in coronavirus cases in a Friday evening tweet
- The sharpest increases relative to the population are in North and South Dakota, Montana, Wisconsin and Idaho
- But daily death rates remain low for now, with an average of 856 daily fatalities Thursday, compared to nealy 5,000 deaths a day during the spring US peak
Coronavirus cases are on the rise in nearly 80 percent of US states and territories, a top US official warned on Friday.
‘New #COVID19 cases are increasing,’ said Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director Dr Robert Redfield said via Twitter on Friday.
Specifically, ‘79% of U.S. jurisdictions reported increasing cases as of October 20,’ he tweeted.
‘Help slow the spread with these healthy habits: wear a mask, wash your hands, stay 6 feet apart from others.’
The US is now reporting an average of more than 60,000 new cases a day, according to a DailyMail.com analysis of data from Johns Hopkins University.
Weekly coronavirus cases are on the rise n 79% of US states and territories, with the steepest increases in the Mountain West, including North and South Dakota, Montana, Idaho and Wisconsin (dark blue), the latest CDC data reveal
CDC’s latest data, updated Friday, shows the steepest rises in cases per population over the last week in the Mountain West, including North and South Dakota, Montana, Idaho and Wisconsin.
Each of those states saw between 49 and 102 new infections per 100,000 residents over the past seven days.
North Dakota is a sparsely populated state, yet coronavirus has spread to more than 6,200 people there in the last week alone.
South Dakota’s case count has increased by 4,360 over the last seven days.
Wisconsin has seen record breaking infection numbers time and time again over the past several weeks.
Yesterday alone the state saw more new infections than South Dakota had in the past week. Thursday Wisconsin reported 4,378 new coronavirus cases.
Its upward case trend has somewhat slowed, but hospitalizations are surging to over 1,000 a day, and a rise in deaths could follow.
With a total of 190,478, about 3.2 percent of the state’s population has been diagnosed with coronavirus. More than 24,000 of them tested positive in the last week alone.
In Montana, 26,503 cases of coronavirus are considered either confirmed or probable. Nearly 5,000 of them were diagnosed in the past week.
Idaho’s case count has risen by more than 6,000 in the past week. Yesterday alone, it saw 950 new infections.
Even as the daily case counts in each of these rural state grow day-over-day, their death tolls remain low.
Yesterday, Idaho recorded its highest death toll in over a month: 11 fatalities.
Yet daily average deaths are actually lower than they were in September.
Conversely, Montana’s deaths are trending upward, with a record number recorded on Thursday.
But it’s high of 23 deaths is still a fraction of the hundreds of daily fatalities reported in New York City when it was the pandemic’s epicenter in the spring.
Deaths are expected to rise as gatherings move indoors this winter, making transmission more likely, but experts are hopeful that because young people are now the main drivers of infections and doctors are better at identifying and caring for COVID-19 patients, mortality rates will not rise to their spring levels again.
Nonetheless, University of Washington researchers predict that if more people don’t start wearing masks and adhering to social distancing, the US death toll will surpass half a million by March.
