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US passes 11 million COVID-19 cases, meaning 1 million were diagnosed with virus in last week alone

US passes 11 million COVID-19 cases, meaning 1 million were diagnosed with virus in last week alone
Posted at 5:48 AM, Nov 16, 2020
and last updated 2020-11-16 07:48:23-05

As of Monday morning, more than 11 million people in the U.S. are confirmed to have contracted COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic, a database kept by Johns Hopkins University.

That means about 1 million Americans have been diagnosed with the virus in the last seven days. The U.S. passed the 10 million case threshold on Nov. 9.

COVID-19 has been spreading at a frightening pace within the U.S. in the month of November. For the past 13 days, at least 100,000 Americans have been diagnosed with the virus each day, a stretch that includes seven days that set records in the number of new daily cases.

The spike in cases has also led to an increase in hospitalizations across the country. According to the COVID Tracking Project, about 70,000 Americans are currently hospitalized with COVID-19 complications, the most since the pandemic began.

Several Midwest states like Iowa and South Dakota have reported that their hospitals are near capacity as they fill up with COVID-19 patients.

The U.S. has also seen an uptick in deaths linked to the virus in the past month, though according to the COVID Tracking Project, death rates remain below where they were during case spikes in the spring and summer. Since Oct. 17, deaths per day linked to the virus have nearly doubled from about 700 a day to about 1,300 a day.

Since the pandemic began, more than 246,000 people in America have died of complications from COVID-19 — the most of any country around the world.