America broke a grim record on Monday, becoming the first country in the world to record more than one million COVID-19 cases in 24 hours
U.S. (January 4, 2021).- The United States recorded a million new cases of COVID-19 on Monday, shattering the global record it previously set, and making the U.S. by far the hardest-hit nation of the pandemic.
On Monday morning, the U.S. reported 55,114,057 confirmed cases.
By midnight, the tally had risen to 56,190,946 – an increase of well over a million in under 24 hours.
There have now been 827,753 deaths in the U.S. from COVID-19. There were 826,065 deaths during the same time frame analysis performed by DailyMail.com, meaning fatalities increased by 1,688 over the same timespan that infections surged by one million.
Monday’s number is almost double the previous record of about 590,000 set just four days ago in the U.S., which itself was a doubling from the prior week.
Outside the U.S., the highest number of cases recorded in a single day was in India, when more than 414,000 people were diagnosed on May 7, 2021.
The surge in cases in the U.S. comes after the holidays, when people gathered in groups with friends and family, frequently indoors.
It is not being fully felt in all the nation’s hospitals, partly because Omicron is believed to be milder than Delta – but is having an impact on logistics as flights are grounded because of staffing shortages, and supply chains fall apart.
Students were supposed to be returning to school on Monday after the Christmas break, but many classrooms were closed.
School districts in Newark, Atlanta, Milwaukee and Cleveland resorted to remote learning, despite trying their hardest to maintain in-person lessons. The new mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis vowed to keep schools in their districts open.
‘It’s chaos,’ said Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, which has polled families throughout the pandemic.
‘The No. 1 thing that parents and families are crying out for is stability.’
Congress experienced an unprecedented jump in infections on Monday, as seven-day positivity rate at a congressional test site surged to 13 percent from just 1 percent in late November.
In New York City, the seven day average for positive tests was 33.49 percent.
In a bid to keep the wheels of the economy and society turning, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) last week reduced the amount of time that an infected person needs to quarantine.
Some health experts have warned that that will only worsen the situation.
Omicron appears to replicate much more efficiently than previous variants, and if infected people have high virus loads, there’s a greater likelihood they’ll pass it on to others, especially the unvaccinated.
Vaccinated people who get the virus are more likely to have mild symptoms, if any, since the shots trigger multiple defenses in your immune system, making it much more difficult for Omicron to slip past them all.
On Monday the Food and Drug Administration authorized the use of a third dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for children ages 12 to 15 and narrowed the interval for booster shot eligibility to five months from six.
Source: Daily Mail
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