The coronavirus case count in the United States has surpassed 6 million and is growing by about 40,000 a day.
The five-day average of new cases is about 42,000, but the trend of new infections has gone down since July, when about 60,000 new cases were reported daily. The test positive rate has also trended downward for weeks and is now at 5.7%, compared to more than 7% in mid-July.
New deaths reported daily in August averaged about 1,000 per day. While that is far lower than the number of deaths reported in the spring, August’s daily death rate is about double the rate in early July. So far, more than 183,400 people have died.
New case increases have slowed across Sun Belt states, which were hardest hit in the late spring and summer. Midwestern states, meanwhile, are reporting new cases at a higher rate, according to data collected by the New York Times. Iowa, for instance, reported 763 new cases on Sunday. There has been an average of 1,165 cases per day over the past week, an increase of 131% from the average two weeks earlier.
The coronavirus is spreading in Spain much faster than any other European country, with 53,000 new cases in the past week. With 114 new infections per 100,000 people in a single week, the virus is spreading faster in Spain than in the U.S., more than twice as fast as in France, and about 8 times the rate in Italy and Britain, according to the New York Times.
August ended with more than 174,000 new cases, about 5,600 new cases daily. Fernando Simon, director of Spain’s Center for the Coordination of Health Alerts and Emergencies, said the end of August was “bittersweet,” according to Spanish news outlet El Pais. The communities with the highest growth rates in July have managed to stabilize transmission. Ildefonso Hernandez, professor of public health and spokesperson for the Spanish Society of Public Health, added the evolution of the epidemic is “very worrying.”
“What has been illustrated this August is that epidemiological surveillance, early detection, and case tracking have not been taken seriously. If it is not done well, we are going to have problems in the future,” Hernandez said.
Thousands of students in Florida resume school this week either in person or from home, even though COVID-19 cases in children jumped by more than 23% with about 9,200 new infections over the last two-plus weeks, NBC News reported. Many Florida school districts and teachers organizations are keeping track of new coronavirus cases in schools, while others are keeping new infections under wraps, according to the Tampa Bay Times. Bay County and Volusia County school systems, for example, will not disclose where new infections have arisen, citing privacy laws.
Recent August numbers represent a 191% increase in children infected in Florida from only about six weeks earlier on July 9. The state health department showed 700 new cases in a single day Friday for Florida children or young adults 24 and younger.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis brought Scott Atlas, the newest White House coronavirus adviser, to the state Capitol Monday to say that testing asymptomatic individuals is unnecessary, adding that tests should be prioritized for the most vulnerable people over children, who are less likely to experience severe illness. Monday was the final day that the last of Florida’s school districts resumed classes.
“You don’t have to be a genius to figure out that if someone’s coughing up virus, they are going to be spreading, so there’s no doubt that the symptomatic super spreaders are the symptomatic people,’’ Atlas said.
Atlas is urging the Trump administration to embrace a “herd immunity” strategy to end the pandemic, according to the Washington Post, which would allow the virus to spread unmitigated through most of the population to build up resistance while focusing on protecting more vulnerable populations.
Atlas has pushed the administration to adopt the strategy that Sweden followed to quell the outbreak, which entailed avoiding restrictions to build up widespread immunity. Sweden’s approach has been heavily criticized by infectious disease experts for putting the population in danger. Sweden now has among the highest infection and death rates in the world.
Over 80% of people fear that politics, rather than science, is driving the COVID-19 vaccine approval process, according to STAT and the Harris Poll. Concern about vaccine safety is bipartisan, with 82% of Democrats saying they fear the politicization of the vaccine and 72% of Republicans agreeing. Similarly, 83% said they worry about the safety of an accelerated vaccine.
Concerns that President Trump has politicized the coronavirus vaccine development have intensified in recent weeks following his message that “deep state” officials at the Food and Drug Administration have delayed treatments and a vaccine for the coronavirus. He also said in his presidential renomination speech last week that his administration will approve a vaccine “before the end of the year or maybe even sooner,” despite government health experts such as Dr. Anthony Fauci saying a vaccine before the end of the year is unlikely.
More people have moved away from densely populated cities and states than normal during the pandemic. Most notably, people in New York and New Jersey relocated to Florida, Texas, and other Sun Belt states, Bloomberg reported.
“We have seen increased mobility across the states — driven by a fear of living in densely populated areas, a realization that the ‘old normal’ of commuting into a city office is still but a distant possibility and the realization that remote work can be an effective, long-term option,” said Gregory Daco, chief U.S. economist at Oxford Economics.
The number of people relocating from New York City during the pandemic almost doubled from a year earlier, while interest in leaving the San Francisco Bay Area jumped 31%, said Eily Cummings, spokeswoman for United Van Lines’s parent company, UniGroup.
