The United States has set a new record for its daily mortality count, reporting just shy of 2,000 new deaths in the span of a single day, as fatalities in New York – the country’s top hotspot – and beyond continue to mount.

The data was looking really good the last couple of days, but today we're back up... 1,939 deaths today and 12,722 to date. Data suggests we're on a big upswing again. Predicting 26k deaths in 7 days, now. pic.twitter.com/8KTHerQk4V — Courtney Perigo (@Courtney_Perigo) April 8, 2020

While stats in recent days appeared to show deaths leveling off, the latest figures gathered by Johns Hopkins University indicate that Tuesday was the deadliest day yet in the US, with some 1,939 new fatalities. New York state has been the greatest contributor to the death toll by far, but the new data shows that deaths are also surging in other states.

Another way to look at this. New York daily deaths have been a major component of U.S. deaths, but, at least today, there was a large increase in deaths in the other states and territories. pic.twitter.com/or3yeGeUTG — The COVID Tracking Project (@COVID19Tracking) April 7, 2020

New Jersey, second in the nation to New York in both cases and fatalities, reported 232 new deaths on Tuesday, according to Governor Phil Murphy, putting its total at 1,232. The state is still well behind New York’s nearly 5,500 fatalities, but with over 3,300 new cases on Tuesday, its Covid-19 outbreak is continuing apace.

The death toll in Louisiana has also been on a steady rise, seeing its own deadliest day on Tuesday with 70 patients succumbing to the lethal illness, though state officials say they are beginning to see signs that the “curve” of new infections is flattening.

Though President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that the US may soon hit the peak of its epidemic, federal authorities are nonetheless scrambling to distribute much-needed medical supplies to the hardest-hit states, with Trump vowing to have some 110,000 mechanical breathing machines ready to hand out in the coming weeks as companies like Ford and General Motors fast-track their production.

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The supplies, in combination with social distancing guidelines and state-level travel restrictions, could help to cut down on the more than 200,000 deaths predicted by models presented by the White House Coronavirus Task Force. With no containment measures, other projections have suggested up to two million American deaths. US health officials have repeatedly warned, however, that such models have a wide margin of error.

The coronavirus pandemic has afflicted more than 1.4 million people and killed just over 82,000 worldwide, with the worst hotspots found in the US, Spain, Italy, France and a number of other European countries. Iran – where the fight against coronavirus is impeded by a raft of crippling US sanctions which Washington refuses to lift, despite pleas from its European allies – has also seen a wave of cases and fatalities, embarking on a campaign to test tens of millions of citizens for the virus in the hope of tracing and containing it. While Covid-19 was first observed in China, aggressive containment measures and lockdowns have slowed the country’s outbreak to a crawl, reporting only two deaths and 62 new cases in its latest figures.

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