US climbs one million coronavirus cases, death toll reaches 56,000

There have now been more than one million confirmed coronavirus cases in the United States, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. More than 56,000 have died from COVID-19-related complications.

The first known U.S. case of COVID-19 was reported on January 21. On April 10, there were more than 500,000 cases, the New York Times reported.

Some reports said the true number of infections may be much higher. The one million figure does not include untold thousands of Americans who contracted the virus but were not tested, either because they did not show symptoms or because of a persistent national testing shortage.

Some disease researchers have estimated that the true number of infections may be somewhere around 10 times the known number, and preliminary testing of how many people have antibodies to the virus seems to support that view.

But as the country’s death toll, now more than 56,000, continues to grow and as the pandemic’s economic fallout continues to mount, the one million case benchmark helped show the scale of human suffering that the virus has wrought.

Roughly one in every 330 people in the United States has now tested positive for the virus. And even as the virus has showed signs of retreating in some hard-hit places, including Seattle and New Orleans, other parts of the country, including Chicago and Los Angeles, continued to report persistently high numbers of new infections. More than 1,300 new cases were announced on Monday alone in Cook County, Illinois, along with nearly 1,000 in Los Angeles County.

Though the country’s urban centres were hit worst early in the pandemic, parts of rural America are now experiencing the most alarming rates of growth. Many of those outbreaks have been tied to outbreaks at meatpacking plants or other workplaces.