(Newswire.net— October 31, 2020) — The United States broke a new daily record on Friday for the number of new coronavirus infections, with more than 100,000 new cases recorded and new records for those hospitalized in many federal states, Reuters reports.
A new record jump in the number of new patients in 24 hours was recorded just a week before the presidential elections on November 3.
Among the hardest hit are key states of Ohio, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, which will play an important role in deciding whether Republican President Donald Trump will get a second term, or whether the new US president will be his Democratic opponent Joe Biden.
The previous daily record in the United States was 91,834 new cases, recorded on just a day earlier on Thursday October 29, and before that 84,169 cases on Oct 23. Previously, the World’s daily record was held by India with 97,894 new cases in one day, recorded on September 17th.
The office in charge of the fight against the coronavirus in the White House announced that the whole country is going in the wrong direction, and warned of a “relentless” spread that requires aggressive action, in order to reduce the number of new cases.
On Thursday, daily records for the number of new cases were set by 12 states: Illinois, Indiana, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, and Oregon.
The number of deaths and hospitalizations is also growing. For the third time in October, on Thursday, more than a thousand people died from COVID-19 in one day, and the following two days haven’t shown much of a decline with 987 deaths recorded on Friday and 914 on Saturday.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious diseases expert, has warned that cases could continue to break 100,000 a day if Americans do not come together to take the necessary steps to halt the spread of the virus, Reuters reports.
So far, over 236 thousand people have died from the disease in the United States, the most in the world.
The number of hospitalized patients with COVID-19 increased by 50 percent in October, to 46,000, the new high since mid-August.