COVID-19 hospitalizations and new cases in the United States broke all time record on Thursday.
As per the latest update published by COVID Tracking Project on Friday, a total of 100,667 patients are currently admitted in U.S. hospitals with coronavirus infection. It came a day after the number crossed the 100000 mark for the first time.
With 2,22,284 new cases reporting in the last 24 hours, the total number of patients infected with the disease increased to 14147241, as per latest data from the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering.
This is the highest daily figure reported in the country, and an increase of about 20 percent from the previous record of 203,653 new cases set a day before. This is the second consecutive day that daily infections are crossing the 200,000 mark.
In the last 24 hours, 2,547 additional deaths were reported nationwide, taking the national total to 276383.
More than 10 states broke case records Thursday. They are Arkansas, Alaska, Arizona, Delaware, Indiana, Massachusetts, Maine, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
"Pennsylvania is particularly worrisome", COVID Tracking Project said. The north-eastern state reported nearly 11500 cases Thursday, 3000 more than its previous record.
California overtook Texas as the worst affected state in the country with a total of 1,290,775 COVID-19 cases. Most of the cases were reported in Los Angeles County. With an additional 7,854 Covid-19 cases Thursday, the County broke the record for the highest number of new cases there since the start of the pandemic for the second time in a week.
California, Texas and Florida - the three most populous US states - are the worst-affected areas of the country in terms of coronavirus infection, having registered more than one million cases each.
The 7-day case average is back at more than 170000. "This could mean that the post-holiday irregularities in data reporting are being normalized," according to the U.S. collaborative volunteer-run effort to track the pandemic said on Twitter.
Vaccine manufacturer Moderna has said it expects to have between 100 million and 125 million doses of its coronavirus vaccine available by the first quarter of 2021.
The top US infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci has apologized for his remarks over British regulators' authorizing the Pfizer vaccine.
Dr. Fauci, who is the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in an interview earlier this week that the United Kingdom's health regulators who authorized Pfizer's Covid-19 vaccine did not scrutinize the trial data as carefully as the US Food and Drug Administration is doing in its review.
"There really has been a misunderstanding, and for that, I'm sorry and I apologize for that. I do have great faith in both the scientific community and the regulatory community at the UK," he told the BBC on Thursday.
On the same day, the world hit another tragic milestone as the global death toll from the pandemic topped 1.5 million.
The UK has received its first batch of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine on Thursday, a day after the government approved it.
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