The U.S. Is Now the Leader in Coronavirus Cases; Surpasses China and Italy

According to data from The New York Times, the United States now has more coronavirus cases than China, Italy, or any other country. As the world’s third most populous nation, the United States has a massive pool of people who can potentially get COVID-19.

The New York Times has listed some “missteps and lost opportunities” in terms of how the nation responded to the virus: “a failure to take the pandemic seriously even as it engulfed China, a deeply flawed effort to provide broad testing for the virus that left the country blind to the extent of the crisis, and a dire shortage of masks and protective gear to protect doctors and nurses on the front lines, as well as ventilators to keep the critically ill alive.”

#BREAKING: The U.S. now leads the world in the number of confirmed coronavirus cases. According to a count by Johns Hopkins University, the number of people infected in the U.S. topped 82,000, ahead of the 81,000 cases in China and 80,000 in Italy. https://t.co/lEnxzjHcqk

— CityNews Toronto (@CityNewsTO) March 26, 2020

Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University in New York, said that this “could have been stopped by implementing testing and surveillance much earlier — for example, when the first imported cases were identified.”

“If these are the cases we’ve confirmed, how many cases are we still missing?” she said.

Millions of Americans have been ordered to stay at home in different states as schools, bars, restaurants, and even businesses have closed.

“We are the new global epicenter of the disease,” said Dr. Sara Keller, an infectious disease specialist at Johns Hopkins Medicine. “Now, all we can do is to slow the transmission as much as possible by hunkering down in our houses while, as a country, we ramp up production of personal protective equipment, materials needed for testing, and ventilators.”

The news about the U.S. surpassing China and Italy broke as President Trump was holding a press conference at the White House.

“It’s a tribute to the amount of testing that we’re doing,” Trump said. “We’re doing tremendous testing, and I’m sure you’re not able to tell what China is testing or not testing. I think that’s a little hard.”

Trump later had a call with the president of China. On Twitter, Trump said he had “a very good conversation” with President Xi Jinping. “Just finished a very good conversation with President Xi of China. Discussed in great detail the CoronaVirus that is ravaging large parts of our Planet. China has been through much & has developed a strong understanding of the Virus. We are working closely together. Much respect!” said the tweet.

The Guardian reported that “while the US has increased its testing capacity in recent days the process has been flawed and incoherent, and the country still lags behind leaders such as South Korea in terms of the number of tests administered per-capita.”

Last week, The Guardian reported that 3.3 million Americans filed for unemployment. This is the biggest “single-week jump” in history, as reported by The Guardian.

On TV: WRAL News at 10 on Fox 50: The U.S. now leads the world in confirmed coronavirus cases as numbers in the Triangle also spike higher. https://t.co/mnEf2hX506

— WRAL NEWS in NC (@WRAL) March 27, 2020

“It’s nobody’s fault,” Trump said about the figure. “Certainly not in this country. Nobody’s fault. We got very lucky when we made a decision not to allow people in from China on a very early date. I say that because some people don’t want to accept it, but this was a great decision made by our country, or the numbers that you’re talking about – we’re a big country – they’d be far greater, far bigger.”

“I heard it could be six million, could be seven million. It’s 3.3 or 3.2, but it’s a lot of jobs, but I think we’ll come back very strong. The sooner we get back to work – you know, every day we stay out it gets harder to bring it back very quickly, and our people don’t want to stay out … I think you’ll see a very fast turnaround once we have a victory over the hidden enemy,” the president added.

As of this writing, there are 165,874 confirmed cases in the U.S. – with 3,178 total deaths and 5,995 total recoveries – according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University.