Story at a glance
- More than 13,000 deaths have been recorded in the U.S.
- Spain has the second highest number of cases with nearly 150,000.
- The U.S. marked the most virus deaths in a single day Tuesday since the outbreak started.
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The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the United States has topped 400,000, according to Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 tracker.
The U.S. currently leads the world in the number of COVID-19 cases by the hundreds of thousands, as Spain, the nation with the second highest number of cases, has tallied nearly 150,000.
Worldwide, more than 1.4 million cases have been confirmed since the virus emerged in late December out of China, with more than 83,000 deaths.
The U.S. has the third highest number of deaths behind Italy and Spain, with nearly 13,000. On Tuesday, the highest coronavirus death toll in a single day was recorded with more than 1,850 virus-related fatalities. That’s a record for any country in a single day since the outbreak started.
But officials in the U.S. have seen some hope in new data suggesting that social distancing policies are working.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Wednesday the infection curve in the state is flattening due to social distancing, but announced the state experienced its largest single day death toll from the coronavirus, hitting a new record of 778.
Cuomo said the number of deaths will continue to increase, even as hospitalizations fall because fatalities are a “lagging indicator” of the outbreak. That means people who have been hospitalized for a long time are starting to die, while fewer new people are being admitted.
“There is no doubt that we are now bending the curve, and there is no doubt that we can’t stop doing what we are doing” Cuomo said, adding if the hospitalization rate continues to decrease, the state’s hospital system “should stabilize over these next couple weeks.”
Top federal health officials Tuesday assured Americans there is a “light at the end of this tunnel.”
U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams said on ABC’s “Good Morning America” he expects the number of COVID-19 deaths to fall short of the White House coronavirus task force’s estimate of 100,000 to 200,000 fatalities.
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He cited states like Washington and California that have successfully flattened the curves of their outbreaks, “because they were aggressively mitigating from the start.”
“The most important thing for the American people now is to really focus on these 30-days-to-slow-the-spread guidelines because we have proof that they work,” Adams said. “But we need you all to cooperate, we need you to continue doing your part. And most people actually are. Over 90 percent of the country is actually doing the right thing right now.”
The U.S. has not enforced a national lockdown, but the federal government has issued guidance advising people to stay home as much as possible and to not gather in groups of more than 10 people through the rest of April. The majority of states have asked residents to only leave their homes for essential services, like buying food and medicine.
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