US daily death toll rises by most in week
Mamta Badkar in New York
The daily coronavirus death toll in the US climbed the most in seven days, a further sign the pandemic is spreading outside the country’s longtime hotspots New York and New Jersey as states push ahead with plans to gradually reopen their economies.
A further 1,353 people in the US died from Covid-19 over the past 24 hours, according to data compiled on Thursday by the Covid Tracking Project, up from 1,259 on Wednesday. That put the total number of deaths from the pandemic at 95,705.
The Covid Tracking project does not count so-called probable deaths, which puts its fatalities count below that of Johns Hopkins University, which reports 101,337 deceased.
The one-day death toll held near a two-month low of 79 for a second consecutive day in New York, which has been the hotspot for the outbreak in the US but has begun to gradually reopen.
Alabama’s daily death toll ticked up again, rising by 9 to 590, while the number of positive tests rose by 467 to 16,310. In Mississippi the number of daily deaths rose for the fourth consecutive day, climbing by 23 to 693 and in Georgia the number of one-day fatalities rose by 55 to 1,962, though the number of positive tests over the past day slowed to 649 bringing the total to 45,070.
The rise in daily deaths accompanied an increase in the number of positive tests, which rose by more than 23,000 bringing the nation’s total to 1.7m. The number of tests conducted rose by 453,000 — a single-day high — to 15.6m. The Covid Tracking Project attributed this to “a few big data dumps” as New York and Louisiana reported 65,245 and 46,182 tests respectively, well above average.