Thirteen states reported Sunday that they had broken their previous seven-day coronavirus case records.
The states that beat their own records for the most new cases in the seven-day period ending Sunday evening are Alaska, Colorado, Indiana, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, and Wisconsin, according to a USA Today analysis of data from Johns Hopkins University.
Many of those states are now seeing more than 25 daily new coronavirus cases per 100,000 people.
In Oklahoma, there have been an average of 1,172 new cases per day over the past week, a jump of 13 percent from the average two weeks ago. Wisconsin has experienced a particularly steep spike with an average of 2,696 new cases per day, 20 percent higher than the average new cases the state logged two weeks earlier.
While metropolitan areas were the first to become hotspots for the coronavirus, midwestern states that fared better during the initial wave of the virus have seen their cases spike in recent months.
Meanwhile, a 25-year-old man from Nevada became the first known American to be infected a second time with the coronavirus, raising concerns about immunity in those who have already had the virus. Several different strains of the coronavirus exist in the U.S.
Trump administration officials have expressed confidence that a coronavirus vaccine will be available to the public by the end of the year. So far, four drugmakers have vaccine trials that have reached late-stage testing under the administration’s coronavirus vaccine program, Operation Warp Speed.
In June, Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief medical advisor for the Trump administration’s coronavirus task force, said that he is “cautiously optimistic” that a vaccine for the coronavirus will be available to the American public by the end of the year or early 2021.
The U.S. has seen more than 7.7 million cases and 215,000 deaths from the coronavirus. Worldwide, more than 37.6 million people have contracted the virus, and more than 1 million have died after being infected.