Washington, (Samajweekly) The US witnessed another grim milestone on Wednesday amid the chaos at the Capitol, with the country’s daily Covid-19 cases, deaths as well as total hospitalisations all set new world records over the course of the pandemic.
A total of 2,99,904 new cases and 3,844 deaths were reported across the nation on Wednesday, according to data updated on Thursday by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Both figures are the highest daily counts since the onset of the pandemic in the country, the Xinhua news agency reported.
This brought the 7-day average daily increase of cases to a record-high of over 2,28,000.
The country reported Covid-19 hospitalisations at over 1,32,400 cases as of Wednesday, which also set a new record, according to The Covid Tracking Project.
Hospitalisations in the South and West are now worse than the Midwest’s peak, with four states in the South seeing record Covid-19 hospitalisations this week, according to the project.
Meanwhile, a total of 52 cases of a coronavirus variant first identified in Britain have been confirmed in the US, according to the CDC.
CDC’s national ensemble now predicts that a total of 405,000 to 4,38,000 Covid-19 deaths will be reported by January 30.
Public health experts have predicted another potential catastrophic Covid-19 surge after the new year’s break as lots of Americans were heading home or travelling for holidays.
The US has recorded over 21.4 million cases with over 3,64,000 related deaths as of Thursday afternoon, according to the real-time count kept by Johns Hopkins University.