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The U.S. has reported more than 3 million coronavirus cases as of Wednesday morning, with all but a handful of states struggling to control outbreaks of COVID-19. One million of those cases have been confirmed over the past month — part of a wave of infection that began after many states started to reopen their economies in May.
The total number of cases also includes nearly 1 million people declared to have recovered. But more than 130,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 – roughly twice the death toll of any other country, according to a tracker from Johns Hopkins University. Most experts believe those numbers vastly underestimate the disease's true toll.
"I did not expect it to grow this quickly" in the U.S., says Bob Bednarczyk, assistant professor of global health and epidemiology at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University in Atlanta.
Nine U.S. states — New York, California, Texas, Florida, New Jersey, Illinois, Massachusetts, Arizona and Georgia — are now reporting more than 100,000 cases. Worldwide, only 20 countries other than the U.S. have hit that number.
At least eight states — Louisiana, Idaho, Georgia, Florida, Nevada, Tennessee, Kansas and Delaware — have seen their average daily number of new cases double this week, compared with just two weeks ago.
The highest per capita rate is currently in Arizona, which has been averaging 53 cases per 100,000 people this week. Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina all have per capita rates higher than 30 cases per 100,000 people.
Arizona officials say they are seeing a rush of hospitalizations, forcing administrators in Pima County to send some patients elsewhere, even to another state, to receive care.
COVID-19 is not affecting all states equally. For example, both North Carolina and Michigan are reporting more than 70,000 cases, but Michigan's death toll is more than four times higher — 6,251 deaths, compared with 1,446 in North Carolina.
New York state, once the epicenter of new U.S. coronavirus cases, has now gone a month since it last reported 1,000 or more new daily cases. But at least eight other states are now routinely surpassing that mark.
New York is now requiring a 14-day quarantine for people who travel from 19 other states, after Gov. Andrew Cuomo added Delaware, Kansas and Oklahoma to a travel advisory list on Tuesday.
On a global level, the U.S. has by far the most confirmed cases in the COVID-19 pandemic. The country has less than 5% of the world's population, but it has about 25% of the world's coronavirus cases — a proportion that has changed little since U.S. case totals began to skyrocket in the spring.
Predictive models have found that if more people in the U.S. covered their faces to prevent spreading the coronavirus, tens of thousands of deaths from COVID-19 could be prevented between July and Oct. 1. But some Americans — from Massachusetts to Florida to Washington state — have fought against state or county mandates that require face masks.
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