US tops 3 million infections as coronavirus surges

Washington: The United States on Wednesday passed another grim coronavirus milestone with three million confirmed cases, as President Donald Trump downplayed the risks posed by the pandemic and aggressively pushed for schools to reopen.

The coronavirus is surging in several southern hotspots including Texas, Florida, Louisiana and Arizona, while it has almost entirely receded from its former epicenter in New York and the north-east.

Johns Hopkins University put the total at 3,009,611, in its real-time tally of confirmed Covid-19 cases.


California, Hawaii, Idaho, Missouri, Montana, Oklahoma and Texas on Tuesday shattered their previous daily record highs for new cases. The biggest jumps occurred in Texas and California, the two largest US states, with more than 10,000 each. About 24 states have reported disturbingly high infection rates as a percentage of diagnostic tests conducted over the past week.

“At this point, we have tested more than 39 million Americans,” US Vice President Mike Pence told reporters. “Among those, more than three million Americans have tested positive and more than 1.3 million Americans have recovered.”

America is by far the hardest-hit country in the world, with more than 130,000 deaths — even as the fatality rate has fallen from highs seen during the late spring peak.

In April and May, as many as 3,000 people were dying each day, while for the past few days it has been around 600. Experts see several reasons for this fall.

These include far greater levels of testing picking up more mild cases, a younger population becoming infected, better treatments — and the lag time between infection and death among the sickest patients.