Story at a glance
- Twelve states recorded data suggesting a record number of new cases.
- Multiple states are beginning to reopen, and the president held a rally in Tulsa, Okla., over the weekend.
Since Friday, 12 states have recorded record highs in new coronavirus cases, an ABC News analysis found.
Using data from The COVID Tracking Project, the outlet confirmed that Florida, Texas, Arizona, Utah, South Carolina, Nevada, Georgia, Missouri, Montana, California, Tennessee, and Oklahoma all showed rising cases as results came in over the weekend.
Multiple new developments have been made regarding the spread of the coronavirus throughout some of these states.
In Florida, new health data indicated that it saw a staggering newly confirmed 4,049 coronavirus infections as of Saturday.
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Oklahoma posted a 478 day-over-day increase in new cases, culminating in 10,515 statewide infections as of June 21.
President Trump held a campaign rally in Tulsa, Okla, on Saturday, which reportedly brought in 6,200 thousand attendees — many indoors, in close quarters and sometimes without masks. On Sunday, Tulsa officials released a statement urging those who have attended “large-scale gatherings” to get tested for COVID-19.
“As expected, Oklahoma’s urban areas as well as a few communities around the state are experiencing a rise in active COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations due to increased social activity and mobility,” the press release said.
In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) recently said that Texas’s high new case count stems from congregate living facilities, like prisons and nursing homes, and that testing remains strong across the state.
Speaking in a press conference with reporters last week, COVID-19 Response Incident Manager Jay Butler notes that rises in cases have multiple culprits.
“Sometimes an increase [in cases] is driven by an increase in availability in testing, sometimes it is driven by outbreaks,” Butler said. “And we’ve seen outbreaks in certain educational settings, in long-term care facilities, early on we saw clusters of infections in shelters for people experiencing homelessness, and sometimes there’s an increase in transmission in the community as well.”
The same ABC analysis also found that hospitalizations for severe coronavirus cases are rising in 17 states, namely Alaska, Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and Utah.
Hospitalizations are regarded as a better metric to determine the severity of coronavirus infections.
Another burgeoning trend within new cases are infections among younger individuals between the ages of 20 and 30. The most troubling hotspots are in Arizona, California, Florida, North Carolina and Texas.
The spikes among young adults are likely because this demographic hold front-line service jobs putting them at risk of infection, and are also more likely to ignore some of the social distancing measures advised by health experts.
At the onset of the pandemic, younger people were told they were less likely to contract a severe infection, while older individuals with preexisting conditions faced the brunt of the COVID-19 outbreak.
Across the U.S., there are 2,281,069 confirmed coronavirus infections, with 119,977 fatalities, per Johns Hopkins data.
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