As nearly two dozen states report rising covid-19 infections with any possible vaccine still months away, at best, New York cleared more than 1,000 daily new cases for the first time in almost four months.
The state—once the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, clocking as many as 9,000 new cases per day on a regular basis back in April—saw 1,005 positive tests results on Friday, NBC4 New York reports, out of 99,953 tests, making for a 1% positive infection rate.
The upward trend might have something to do with the increased reopening of local businesses, the outlet says, as well as with colleges and universities putting profits over public health by requiring students from all over the country to live on campus during the academic year. New York City public schools—the largest school district in the country with nearly 1 million students, according to 2019 Census Bureau data—will also resume in-person instruction next week, putting teachers, students, and students’ families at risk. Not that we have the state-funded childcare system needed to accommodate fully remote instruction. What a horrible country. Abolition now? Many people are saying this…
New York’s rising number of daily new cases coincides with a similarly upward trend in 22 other states, most of which are situated in the heartland and the midwestern U.S., CNN reports. Beyond that cluster, California became the first state to top 800,000 total infections, with Texas and Florida trailing close behind with 747,500 and 695,000 total cases, respectively.
Nationally, we’ve now cleared 7 million confirmed cases since Johns Hopkins University recorded the first case in the U.S. in January, per CNN, and more than 203,000 people have died—about as many people in American prisons who’ve been infected with covid, according to The New York Times.
As far as vaccination talk goes, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s leading infections disease expert, said on Friday that we probably won’t get a safe, accessible, and effective covid vaccine until next April. Still, he warned, life won’t return to anything resembling “normality” until well after that.
“By the time you get enough people vaccinated so that you can feel you’ve had an impact enough on the outbreak, so that you can start thinking about maybe getting a little bit more towards normality, that very likely, as I and others have said, will be maybe the third quarter or so of 2021,” Fauci said, per CNN. “Maybe even into the fourth quarter.”