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October could beat July’s record for new cases.

Yesterday, new reports of confirmed COVID-19 cases from around the United States numbered over 71,600. As new heavy zones of the virus pop in the Midwest and in suburbs, the number of daily coronavirus infections is on the rise, and could outpace the previous single-day record of new cases set back in July.


“Unfortunately, we are seeing a distressing trend here in the United States,” CDC Deputy Director for infectious diseases Jay Butler said in a press call. Butler has attributed this new surge in cases to falling temperatures, as well as “smaller, more intimate gatherings of family, friends and neighbors” being held indoors to escape the cold.

According to statistics from Johns Hopkins University, 38 US states have seen a COVID-19 case frequency increase of at least 5%. The nation is currently averaging out at around 61,100 new cases every day. The same statistics show that a record high number of cases are coming from western and Midwestern states, including Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, the Dakotas, and more.

“If steps are not taken to reduce transmission at the community level, it’ll come to no surprise that health-care systems start to feel a pinch and start to head towards capacity and beyond capacity,” infectious disease specialist Dr. Isaac Bogoch told CNBC in an interview.

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During the final debate of the 2020 Presidential Election last night, Democratic candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden cautioned that America is heading for a “dark winter” with no concrete plan of action against the virus or better estimation of when a vaccine will be available. President Donald Trump responded by repeating his frequent claim that the country is “rounding the corner.”

“I don’t think we’re going to have a dark winter at all,” Trump said. “We’re opening up our country, we’ve learned and studied and understand the disease, which we didn’t at the beginning.”