Washington, D.C, United States of America – US surpasses 4 million officially recorded confirmed cases on Thursday.
Quarter of the confirmed 4 million cases in United States is known to be reported in just the past 15 days.
Health experts say that the rise in the country’s daily rate of confirmed coronavirus cases and reporting a new-record number of hospitalizations shows that the United States is far from containing a virus that is straining hospitals and labs.
On Wednesday, approximately 59,600 people were hospitalized due to Covid-19 in the United States. This is roughly 300 short of the country’s peak recorded in mid-April, according to the Covid Tracking Project.
“We’ve rolled back essentially two months’ worth of progress with what we’re seeing in number of cases … in the United States,” Dr. Ali Khan, dean of the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s College of Public Health, told CNN on Thursday.
The United States has officially recorded 4,032,430 cases up to date according to Johns Hopkins University. Among these at least 144,167 people have died from the virus.
The reported count is seen to be increasing rapidly. The national seven-day average of new daily cases was 67,429 on Wednesday, a record.
The country took nearly 100 days to count its first 1 million cases, from January 21 to April 28, and it took only 15 days to rise from 3 million cases on July 8 to more than 4 million cases in the United States according to JHU figures.
The Agency for Health Care Administration said that more than 50 hospitals in the United States have reached the maximum capacity in their intensive care units and that only 15% of the state’s ICU beds are currently available.
“Any spike in cases or increase in hospitalizations is going to put our ER system and hospital systems in peril,” Dr. Damian Caraballo, an emergency room physician in Tampa, told CNN.
More than 150 prominent US medical experts, scientists, teachers, nurses and others have signed a letter to political leaders urging them to call for a rest: shut everything down again and start over.
“The best thing for the nation is not to reopen as quickly as possible, it’s to save as many lives as possible,” they wrote in the document, which was sent to the Trump administration, leading members of Congress and state governors.
“Right now we are on a path to lose more than 200,000 American lives by November 1st. Yet, in many states people can drink in bars, get a haircut, eat inside a restaurant, get a tattoo, get a massage, and do myriad other normal, pleasant, but nonessential activities.”
Several Covid-19 cases went un-diagnosed, especially during the start of the pandemic when testing was less available. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said that the actual amount of case totals are probably more than 10 times greater than official figures in most places. One study had even suggested that the United States might have had more than 8 million cases in March alone.
