The United States continues to surge past one grim milestone after another — over the past 24 hours, the country reported one coronavirus-related death every 30 seconds, data tracking the virus showed.
The U.S. has reported more than 16.7 million cases of COVID-19 since the pandemic began, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. By far the hardest-hit country, with more cases and deaths than the next two worst-hit countries (India and Brazil) combined, the U.S. has averaged more than 200,000 positive cases in 9 of the past 10 days.
Though there is evidence to suggest that the spike in daily cases is flattening in the short term, hospitalizations and deaths often lag a few weeks behind caseload spikes, according to research from Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The U.S. is also bracing for a surge related to Thanksgiving gatherings and upcoming Christmas celebrations.
In the past 24 hours, the U.S. reported a record 3,019 deaths related to the coronavirus — the equivalent of one person dying every 30 seconds, according to ABC News. The country’s rolling average of daily deaths related to COVID-19 has more than doubled from a month ago, and there were only five days in November during which there were fewer than 1,000 deaths across the country.
Hospitalizations have risen in tandem — there are more than 112,000 people hospitalized in the U.S. because of the coronavirus, nearly double the figures from the July surge across the Sun Belt and more than six times the average in April.
The U.S. isn’t the only country experiencing a deadly winter surge. Across the world, the two-week rolling average of reported deaths is up 7%, with Brazil, Italy, Mexico, and Russia all reporting a seven-day average of more than 500 deaths a day, according to data from the New York Times. Germany’s average is 499.3.
