The U.S. passed 11 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 on Sunday as the country saw a surge of roughly a million new cases in the past week, according to figures tabulated by Johns Hopkins University.
As the world neared 55 million total confirmed cases since the beginning of the pandemic, health officials around the U.S. are scrambling to confront a wave of new infections that in many states has outpaced the numbers seen during the height of the first wave of COVID-19 cases earlier this year.
The surge has led to many jurisdictions hitting the pause button on plans to relax COVID-19 restrictions on gatherings and public life, while some localities have moved to take more drastic measures to stop the virus’s spread.
Chicago city officials announced a 30-day stay-at-home order on Thursday amid a double-digit percentage rise in the rate of newly confirmed cases in recent days, while on Sunday the states of Washington and Michigan put new restrictions on gyms, restaurants, theaters and indoor gatherings.
“Record cases over the past week will be record hospitalizations soon,” tweeted Surgeon General Jerome Adams on Sunday.
“Our/ YOUR communities and hospitals simply can not sustain high level care at this rate of increase,” he added.
Adams’s remark comes as the Trump administration’s coronavirus response efforts have largely gone dark amid the president’s election defeat to President-elect Joe Biden, which the president has publicly disputed. Anthony Fauci, one of the top officials on the White House coronavirus response team, said last week that he hasn’t spoken with the president personally in more than a month after the two previously appeared at press briefings on a near-daily basis.
The president has frequently claimed in recent weeks that the U.S. is “rounding the curve” in terms of fighting the virus even as the rate of new infections reaches record levels.