Virus deaths in U.S. rise amid crisis

A far smaller proportion of people who catch the coronavirus are dying from it than were in the spring, experts say.

Yet, the sheer breadth of the current outbreak means that the cost in lives lost every day is still climbing.

More than 170,000 Americans are testing positive for the virus on an average day, straining hospitals across the country, including in many states that had seemed to avoid the worst of the pandemic. More than 1.1 million people tested positive in the past week alone.

At the peak of the spring wave, about 31,000 new cases were announced each day, though that was a vast undercount because testing capacity was extremely limited. On April15, the U.S. reached a grim nadir: 2,752 people were reported to have died from COVID-19, more than on any day before or since.

Still, the toll of the virus was an abstraction for many Americans because deaths were concentrated in a handful of states like New York, New Jersey and Louisiana.

Now, the deaths are scattered widely across the entire country and there is hardly a community that has not been affected. On Wednesday, when 2,300 deaths were reported countrywide — the highest toll since May — only three counties reported a toll of more than 20.

Forty-four states have set weekly case records, and 25 states have set weekly death records in November, as the nation’s death toll has surpassed 264,000 and officials worry that Thanksgiving gatherings may cause infections to spread still more widely in the coming days.