Imran Yaqub Dhillon
New York
Worldwide coronavirus cases crossed 40 million on Monday, cases continue to soar across the United States and one top infectious disease expert warned Americans that the next few months will be the “darkest of the pandemic.”
Health experts say the predicted fall surge is here, and rising cases across the US appear to bear that out. The US is averaging more than 55,000 new cases a day, and 10 states reported their highest single-day case counts on Friday. At least 27 states are showing an upward trend in the number of cases reported, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
“The next six to 12 weeks are going to be the darkest of the entire pandemic,” Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, told “Meet the Press” on Sunday.
Osterholm highlighted the 70,000 cases of Covid-19 reported on Friday, which matched the largest number seen during the peak of the pandemic. Between now and the holidays, the US will see numbers “much, much larger than even the 67 to 75,000 cases,” he said.
According to a Reuters data shows the pace of the pandemic continues to pick up. It took just 32 days to go from 30 million global cases to 40 million.
Record one-day increases in new infections were seen at the end of last week, with global coronavirus cases rising above 400,000 for the first time.
There were an average of around 347,000 cases each day over the past week, compared with 292,000 in the first week of October.
New cases are growing at over 150,000 a day in Europe, as many countries including Italy, Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Poland, Ukraine, Cyprus, and the Czech Republic have reported record daily increases in the number of coronavirus infections.
Europe currently accounts for over 17% of the global cases and nearly 22% of the deaths related to the virus worldwide.
Parts of the UK were put into lockdown as Prime Minister Boris Johnson bid to contain a second wave of infections through local measures.
