■ MORE CASES:
Maryland officials reported Sunday that the state has confirmed 1,053 new cases of the coronavirus. The new COVID-19 cases bring the state’s total to 32,587. Officials also said 28 more people died due to complications from the illness since Saturday, bringing the state total up to 1,538 fatalities.
Maryland officials reported Sunday that the state has confirmed 1,053 new cases of the coronavirus.
The new cases bring to 32,587 the state’s total number of cases of COVID-19. Officials also said 28 more people died due to complications from the illness since Saturday, bringing the state total up to 1,538 fatalities.
In addition, 106 people probably have died due to the disease or complications of it, but those cases have not been confirmed by a laboratory.
As of Sunday, 1,640 people are currently hospitalized with the disease, a decrease of 25 patients, making it the third consecutive day with a decline. Officials said 611 people are in intensive care and 1,029 people are in acute care.
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, has said he will start his three-stage plan to reopen businesses and lift social distancing restrictions after the state sees two weeks of declines in the number of new deaths and cases requiring hospitalization and intensive care.
Dr. Tom Inglesby, one of the doctors advising Hogan on his coronavirus task force, cautioned that the United States is still in the early stages of the pandemic. He rebutted Republican President Donald Trump’s recent claim that the coronavirus will go away without a vaccine.
“Hopefully over time we’ll learn to live with it, and we’ll be able to reduce the risk of transmission,” Inglesby said on Fox News Sunday, “but it’s going to stay as a background problem in the country and around the world until we have a vaccine.”
Inglesby also pressed the importance of more robust contact tracing and testing operations.
Over the weekend, Maryland Del. Kirill Reznik sent a letter to the health secretary questioning what has become of the 500,000 COVID-19 testing kits the state acquired from South Korea.
Hogan spokesman Mike Ricci wrote in an email that there are several indications the tests have been distributed, including to nursing homes, though he did not provide a breakdown.
“Far from ‘sitting’ on any tests, the state is actively deploying them to help save lives and slow the spread of COVID-19,” Ricci wrote in an email.
Since Tuesday, Ricci said, the state has sent roughly 4,000 tests to nursing homes. Many of those testing kits came from South Korea.
Hogan posted on Facebook that the state delivered hundreds of COVID-19 tests Saturday to Charlotte Hall, a home for disabled veterans in St. Mary’s County, where the state has reported 16 cases and one death among residents and six cases among the staff.
In total, 5,955 people in Maryland have been hospitalized due to complications from COVID-19, with 2,293 since released from isolation, the state reported.
Prince George’s and Montgomery counties continue to lead the state in total cases, with 9,496 and 6,762, respectively. The two counties, Maryland’s two most populated, account for nearly half of all confirmed cases and deaths from the disease in the state.
In Ocean City, where the beaches and boardwalk reopened to the general public Saturday, 14 people have been confirmed to have contracted COVID-19, an increase of one case since Friday. While the total case number for Ocean City is low, the U.S. Census estimates the town has only around 7,000 year-round residents total.
The 20783 ZIP code — which includes parts of Hyattsville, Adelphi and Langley Park in Prince George’s County — continues to lead the state in total cases with 1,147, adding 43 new cases in the past 24 hours.
Silver Spring in Montgomery County continues to see a high concentration of cases as three ZIP codes associated with the D.C. suburb — 20906, 20902 and 20904 — have a combined1,815 confirmed cases of the coronavirus. Those three ZIP codes alone have seen more than 400 newly confirmed cases of COVID-19 over the past week.
In Baltimore City, which has 3,317 total confirmed cases as of Sunday, the northwest part of the city continues to lead in terms of concentration of cases.
The 21215 ZIP code, which includes parts of Northwest Baltimore and Baltimore County, has 470 confirmed cases.
Officials said that nearly half of those cases, 231, were confirmed at the FutureCare Lochearn nursing home in Northwest Baltimore. As of Sunday, 21residents at the facility have died due to the disease.
Maryland’s black residents continue to be disproportionately affected by the pandemic. As of Sunday, black residents account for 10,623 of the cases in which race is known, the leading count among all racial demographics in the state despite making up less than a third of the state’s population.
By contrast, white residents account for 7,018 cases of COVID-19, despite the fact that about 59% of the state is white, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Hispanic residents account for 6,686 cases. Race is not known in 6,409 cases.