Florida, Texas and California — three of the states hit hardest by the coronavirus pandemic — all set new records for the daily number of deaths from the virus on Thursday, signaling that that recent spike in cases is beginning to take its toll.
Florida reported 120 new deaths as the state has quickly become one of the world’s epicenters for the virus.
Texas reported that it had suffered 105 COVID-19 deaths, breaking its record that it had set just one day earlier with 98. The Lone Star State broke its record for the number of daily new cases on Tuesday with 10,028 and added another 9,782 new infections on Thursday.
California reported 149 new deaths on Thursday and reported just more than 7,000 new cases of the virus, bringing its total number of cases since the pandemic began to nearly 300,000.
“For those that just think, now people are getting it, no one’s dying, that is very misleading,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) said Thursday.
Despite the rising numbers nationwide, some businesses and states are moving ahead with plans to reopen.
Disney World in Orlando reopened for members only on Thursday, even as the county that it’s located in saw a 130 percent jump in coronavirus cases over the past two weeks, CBS News reports.
Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious diseases expert, on Thursday said that hard-hit states should not be moving forward with reopening, but did not call for a full nationwide shutdown.
“I would think we need to get the states pausing in their opening process, looking at what did not work well and try to mitigate that,” Fauci, a member of the White House coronavirus task force, told The Hill’s Steve Clemons. “I don’t think we need to go back to an extreme of shutting down.”
The U.S. has recorded more than 3 million cases of the coronavirus with more than 130,000 deaths, according to a database from Johns Hopkins University.