As clashes over face-covering mandates and school reopening plans intensified throughout the United States, the country shattered its single-day record for new cases today — more than 75,000 with some numbers still to be announced.
This was the 11th time in the past month that the record had been broken.
The number has more than doubled since June 24, when the country registered 37,014 cases after a lull in the outbreak had kept the previous record, 36,738, standing for two months.
As of Wednesday, the country’s seven-day average case number exceeded 63,000, up from about 22,200 a month before.
The previous record, 68,241 cases, was announced last Friday.
Today’s record included more than 5,000 cases in Bexar County, Texas, which contains San Antonio, where numbers spiked in part because of a backlog in test reporting.
Florida on Thursday broke its single-day death record for the second time this week, reporting 156 new fatalities.
It was one of 10 states to reach a record for deaths in a single day this week, joining Idaho, Alabama, Arizona, Utah, Oregon, Texas, Hawaii, Montana and South Carolina.
More than half the 50 states have issued mask requirements, including Arkansas, where Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a Republican, announced a face covering requirement today, after previously taking a more hands-off approach.
Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado, a Democrat, also issued a mask order today, after questioning whether such a mandate would be enforceable.
But there remains firm resistance in many circles, including from some Republican leaders who view mask requirements as a threat to personal liberty.
Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, who announced this week that he was suspending all local mask mandates, filed a lawsuit today challenging the authority of leaders in Atlanta to require masks inside their city’s limits.
Also on Thursday, health officials in Dallas announced that the city’s public and private schools would conduct classes virtually for the first three weeks of the school year, which begins Aug. 17.
Several other large school districts have announced plans to rely on distance learning when they reopen for the upcoming school year, bucking pressure from the Trump administration.
The White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, today reiterated President Trump’s view that schools must open in the fall.
“When he says open,” she said, “he means open and full, kids being able to attend each and every day at their school. The science should not stand in the way of this.”
Also today, Target and CVS joined other large retailers by announcing that they would require customers to wear face masks at all stores nationwide.
Similar announcements had already been made by Walmart, Kroger and Kohl’s.
CVS will start requiring masks on July 20, and Target’s policy will go into effect on Aug. 1.
As the pandemic continues to quicken worldwide for a third consecutive month, many countries are seeing resurgences of the virus — or never succeeded in containing it at all.
Few have been able to follow the examples that were set by some of the earliest hot spots in China, South Korea and in Europe, which showed that even large initial outbreaks could be suppressed, offering a degree of hope.
Two-thirds of the 230,000 new cases that were reported worldwide on Wednesday came from just four countries — the United States, Brazil, India and South Africa — which are all failing to contain enormous, fast-moving epidemics.
India’s cases are steadily approaching 1 million. South Africa, which seemed to have some success early on, is faltering under an accelerating wave of new cases that is overwhelming some hospitals.
Outbreaks continue to grow at dangerous levels throughout Latin America, led by Brazil, where last week President Jair Bolsonaro announced that he had tested positive, becoming one of the more than 35,000 new cases his country recorded each day.
And the outbreak in the United States has surged over the past month, after many states eased restrictions.
The nation has now seen more than 3.5 million cases and 137,000 deaths, more than any other country in the world, according to a New York Times database.
The U.S. is now averaging some 63,000 new cases a day — twice as many as in April, when the nation reached what many officials initially hoped would be its peak.
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the top infectious disease expert in the U.S., noted in an interview today on Facebook with its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, that after its initial peak, the nation never succeeded in driving the virus beneath a plateau of about 20,000 new cases a day.
“When you looked at what happened in the European countries, when they had their peak and they locked down, they locked down to the tune of about 90 to 95 percent of the country, truly locked down,” he said, adding that they succeeded in driving new infections down to a baseline of “literally handfuls of new cases — tens, twenties, thirties, not hundreds and thousands.”
“What I think we need to do, and my colleagues agree, is we really almost need to regroup, call a timeout — not necessarily lock down again, but say that we’ve got to do this in a more measured way,” Dr. Fauci said. “We’ve got to get our arms around this and we’ve got to get this controlled.”