US passes 2 million coronavirus diagnoses as reopened states see second wave
There is a new wave coming in parts of the country. And it's small and it's distant so far, but it's coming.'
More than two million Americans have now tested positive for coronavirus as a second wave of the outbreak appears to be hitting some states that have reopened.
On Thursday, the United States saw total Covid-19 diagnoses soared past 2,000,600 according to data gathered by Johns Hopkins University. The US has suffered nearly 113,000 deaths because of the outbreak, including more than 30,000 in the country’s coronavirus epicenter, New York state, which has reported over 400,000 cases of the virus.
New Jersey, Illinois, Massachusetts and California have all reported more than 100,000 positive cases of Covid-19 with the second-most cases in the country coming from New York’s neighbor, New Jersey, which has seen over 165,000 Covid-19 diagnoses and more than 12,000 deaths.
New coronavirus cases have continued to rise in 14 states including Arizona and Texas, which reported 1,556 and 2,437 new cases respectably yesterday, as they ease social distancing and lockdown measures aimed at combatting the virus’s spread. In Texas, hospitalizations rose 6.3% in a single day to 2,065 on Tuesday, which is the biggest daily increase since the outbreak began in the state.
A spike in positive Covid-19 cases has also been reported in Florida, which saw 8,553 news cases of the virus this week. However, some states have continued to see cases drop as they reopen like Georgia – where salons, tattoo parlors and gyms have been open for more than a month.
‘There is a new wave coming in parts of the country,’ Eric Toner of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security told Bloomberg News.
‘And it’s small and it’s distant so far, but it’s coming.’
Despite warnings that a second wave of the virus may be on the horizon, the White House coronavirus task force reports that it has not found any direct correlation between states reopening and increased coronavirus cases.
However, Americans continue to be left out of work even as the country begins to open back up. More than 1.5 million people filed jobless claims last week, according to data released by the US Labor Department on Thursday.
The latest figures bring the three-month total of job losses to 44 million, although the weekly rate of cases has slowly been dropping over the past ten weeks after it peaked at the end of March.
‘The decline in continuing claims affirms what we saw in last Friday’s jobs report: the labor market recovery appears to be underway,’ Daniel Zhao, senior economist at Glassdoor told Fox Business.
‘The road ahead promises to still be rocky, however, as transition point in the economy are notoriously difficult to predict and the unsteady declines over the last few weeks do not inspire confidence that recovery is on solid ground.’
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