Coronavirus cases are rising across more than half of the nation even as the outbreak slows across former hotspots in Arizona, Florida, California and Texas, CNBC informed.
New cases are up by at least 5%, based on a seven-day average, in 26 states as of Sunday, compared with just 12 states a week ago, according to a CNBC analysis of data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. In Arizona, Florida, California and Texas, new cases are declining by at least as much, though those states still accounted for nearly 10,000 new cases combined on Sunday — or about a fourth of all new U.S. cases.
Across the nation, average new cases have climbed three of the last five days.
Many of the recently growing outbreaks across the country are occurring in the Midwest, including Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio and the Dakotas. Those states collectively reported more than 7,400 new cases Sunday, according to data collected by Hopkins.
Iowa has reported an average of more than 1,100 new cases a day over the past seven days, more than double from a week ago, according to Hopkins data. Some of that rise, though, is likely because the state began including antigen test results last week. South Dakota has reported an average of more than 290 cases per day over the past week, up over 104% compared with a week ago.
New cases are also still rising in a number of more populous Southern states. Alabama has reported an average of more than 1,400 new cases a day over the past week, up more than 53% from a week ago, according to Hopkins data, and South Carolina has reported an average of over 905 daily infections, up 15% compared with last week.
The steady rise of new cases in these states and others are turning up in the national numbers. New cases nationwide have been on the decline for more than a month, but the rate of decline has slowed over the past few days. Average new cases have hovered between 41,000 and 43,000 over the past week, a level far higher than federal health officials say is acceptable heading into the fall.
The country collectively reported 35,337 new cases on Sunday, according to Hopkins data, but case reporting tends to drop over the weekend with local health departments closed. The seven-day average of new cases per day has risen over the last two days after weeks of decline. It now stands at just over 42,100, down just 1.2% compared with a week ago — more than double the daily average in early June before the outbreak started to pick up speed again, according to a CNBC analysis of Hopkins data.
Over the past seven days, an average of 5.7% of all tests processed each day came back positive as of Sunday, according to data from Hopkins. That’s down from 6.1% a week prior, Hopkins data shows. Epidemiologists often point to the percentage of positive tests as a good indicator of the status of an outbreak.
To be sure, the nation is still reporting daily new cases far below the peak of the outbreak in late July, when the country was reporting nearly 70,000 new cases every day. Hospitalizations, which lag behind the trend of new cases, are also down. As of Sunday, states reported 35,730 individuals currently hospitalized with Covid-19, down 9.4% from a week ago, according to data collected by Covid Tracking Project, a volunteer project founded by journalists at The Atlantic magazine.
The worrying trends across the Midwest come about two weeks after Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Robert Redfield said the middle of the country “is getting stuck” when it comes to combating the virus.
“We’re starting to see some of the cases now in the red zone areas are falling, but if you look at those states that are in what we call the yellow zone, between 5% and 10%, they’re not falling, so middle America right now is getting stuck,” he told Dr. Howard Bauchner of the Journal of the American Medical Association. “We don’t need to have a third wave in the heartland right now.”
In the same interview, Redfield said he’d like to bring the number of daily new cases reported across the country to below 10,000 and the number of new Covid-19 deaths reported each day below 250.
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