On the eve of an election that has become for many Americans a referendum on President Donald Trump’s pandemic performance, Covid-19 cases were rising rapidly in virtually every state as the death toll continued to climb, the latest NBC News figures showed Monday.
Nearly 9.3 million cases have been reported since the start of the pandemic and more than 232,000 have died, both world-leading tallies, the numbers revealed.
In the last two weeks, records for the daily number of new cases have been set and shattered on successive days, most recently Friday when 98,500 infections were reported.
During the same time period, case numbers rose by 25 percent in 40 states with some of the biggest increases coming in key battleground states such as Michigan (115 percent) and Wisconsin (88 percent), the NBC News analysis showed.
Hotly-contested Pennsylvania has reported more than 2,000 coronavirus cases for six straight days, something that hasn’t happened before.
Tiny Rhode Island, a state that had previously been able to flatten the curve, reported a 221 percent spike in cases. And Massachusetts on Monday imposed an overnight curfew starting Friday after reporting more than 1,000 new infections for nine straight days.
The only states in which coronavirus cases declined during that two-week period were Louisiana and Hawaii, along with the Northern Mariana Islands.
Overall, Covid-19 deaths were up by 15 percent in the last two weeks, the figures showed.
“We’re right at the beginning of what looks like exponential growth in a lot of states,” Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration, said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “This is very worrisome as we head into the winter.”
In other coronavirus news:
- Forty-eight U.S. states now have a full or partial mask mandate, including states led by Republican governors like Arkansas which were slow to impose such a restriction. The only two that don’t are North and South Dakota, the latter of which is led by GOP Gov. Kristi Noem who claimed numbers showing her state was the site of a “superspreader” motorcycle rally in August were “made up.”
- While Europe was being hit by a second wave of Covid-19 infections, Belgium had the highest rate of infections on the continent.
- Mexico, one of the hardest hit countries in the world, honored and mourned the more than 1,700 health care workers known to have died during the pandemic during the national Day of the Dead commemorations.
- Prince William, who is second in line to the British throne, tested positive for the coronavirus in April, British media has reported.
The U.S. now accounts for more than a quarter of the world’s nearly 47 million confirmed coronavirus cases and about a fifth of the Covid-19 fatalities, according to the Johns Hopkins University Covid-19 dashboard.
Down in the polls and claiming to be completely recovered from his bout with Covid-19, Trump on the campaign trail continued to downplay the danger at rallies where many supporters did not wear masks or attempt to practice social distancing.
Trump also took fresh aim at Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading expert on infectious diseases who survived more than one White House attempt to discredit him after he poured cold water on the president’s false claims that the pandemic would “just disappear.”
When the crowd in Opa-Locka, Florida, began chanting “Fire Fauci! Fire Fauci! Fire Fauci!” Trump waited a beat before saying: “Don’t tell anybody, but let me wait until a little after the election. I appreciate the advice.”
Fauci’s latest offense? He said the country was not prepared for the next few months of the pandemic.
“We’re in for a whole lot of hurt,” Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told The Washington Post. “It’s not a good situation. All the stars are aligned in the wrong place as you go into the fall and winter season, with people congregating at home indoors. You could not possibly be positioned more poorly.”
Covid-19 was first reported in December in Wuhan, China, and showed up in the U.S. a month later.
On Jan. 31, Trump imposed a China travel ban that exempted U.S. citizens and others. But Trump resisted calls for stronger action calling the demands a new “Democratic Party hoax” aimed at derailing his presidency.
Privately, Trump admitted in taped interviews with the reporter Bob Woodward that Covid-19 was “deadly stuff” but wanted to “play it down.”
It wasn’t until March that Trump declared it a national emergency.
After that, Trump became what critics have called the world’s biggest superspreader of Covid-19 misinformation who promoted unproven “miracle cures” such as bleach or hydroxychloroquine, endangered Americans by politicizing the use of masks and downplaying the danger while regularly claiming that his administration had done a “phenomenal job.”
Trump also pressured the governors of Southern and Western states to reopen just as Covid-19 was spreading to those areas and the bulk of the cases and deaths in key states such as Florida, Texas and Arizona were reported after the governors there loosened restrictions.
Even after Trump caught the virus and it rapidly spread through the White House to infect the first lady, his son Barron and others, he refused to consistently wear a mask at public events. He also boasted about being immune and displayed what critics called a cavalier attitude that infuriated the loved ones of Covid-19 victims.
That hurt Trump in the polls. Some 57 percent of Americans said they disapproved of the way he handled the coronavirus crisis in the final national NBC/Wall Street Journal poll of the presidential election, which was released Sunday.
