The United States reported at least 2,074 deaths resulting from the novel COVID-19 coronavirus Friday, the highest number of fatalities the country has seen in a single day since the pandemic began. Overall in the U.S., there have been nearly 19,000 deaths, and more than 500,000 confirmed cases.
Per CNN, Friday may have been the peak number of deaths in the U.S., though there's certainly no guarantee that's the case. Dr. Chris Murray, the director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, which created the model the White House is using to gauge the trends of the pandemic, said that while results will vary by state, "we seem to be pretty much close to the peak" at the national level. But Murray cautioned that lifting lockdown measures too soon could change that. "There's a very substantial risk of rebound if we don't wait to the point where most transmission is near zero in each state," he said.
New York remains the center of the U.S. outbreak, and on Friday Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) announced the state had recorded its highest single-day death toll yet, at 779. "That is so shocking and painful and breathtaking, I don't even have the words for it," he said.
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As of Saturday morning, the global death toll stood at more than 103,000 and the number of confirmed cases had surpassed 1.7 million, data complied by Johns Hopkins University showed. In some hot spots, like Spain, the daily death totals remain high, but seem to be on a downward trend. Read more at NPR and CNN.
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