Maryland state health officials reported 40 new COVID-19 deaths and 536 new cases Tuesday, marking the state’s largest daily spike in deaths so far. The latest report brings Maryland just shy of 10,000 cases with 9,472 total reported.
As of Monday, only 13 states had breached the 10,000-case mark, according to data published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At the top of that list is New York, which had more than 202,000 reported cases reported Tuesday.
Maryland’s Department of Health has reported more than 7,000 cases since the start of April. Of the 9,472 cases confirmed so far, 302 patients have died and 2,122 have been hospitalized.
The state began releasing information on the racial and ethnic backgrounds of diagnosed patients in the last week, numbers that underline the racial disparities seen in other states across the country. Though United States Census data from last July shows black Americans represent about 31 percent of the state’s population, approximately 40 percent of Maryland’s reported COVID-19 deaths are from that group. Prince George’s County, which has the greatest number of COVID-19 cases and deaths in Maryland, also has a population that is about 64.4 percent black.
Similar trends have been noted in Louisiana and Missouri. Last week, Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards said about 70 percent of his state’s COVID-19 deaths were black Americans, and Dr. Fredrick Echols with the City of St. Louis Department of Health said all of the city’s COVID-19 deaths on or before April 8 were black Americans.
While Maryland and other states are still seeing spikes in new cases and deaths, some states along the East and West coasts are entering a plateau, paving the way for governors to begin making plans to reopen their state economies. Leading that charge is New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who acknowledged the difficult balance of lifting stay-at-home orders while keeping residents safe.
“This is not a light switch that we can just flick on and everything goes back to normal,” Cuomo said Monday in a statement announcing the multi-state effort.
As Cuomo and other state leaders were uniting to decide on strategies for reopening parts of the country, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan was issuing a plea to “break the logjam in the Senate” so his state and others could receive federal fiscal relief.
“The nation’s governors are urging Congress to act immediately and appropriate $500 billion specifically for the states and territories to meet our budgetary shortfalls that have resulted from this crisis,” Hogan said in a statement. “Without sufficient federal relief, states will have to confront the prospect of significant reductions to essential services, which will in turn devastate the economic recovery and our efforts to get people back to work.”
