(NEW YORK) — Here’s the latest information on the COVID-19 coronavirus as of 9:15 a.m. ET.
Latest reported numbers globally per Johns Hopkins University
Global diagnosed cases: 7,036,623
Global deaths: 403,211. The United States has the most deaths of any single country, with 110,514.
Number of countries/regions: at least 188
Total patients recovered globally: 3,153,223
Latest reported numbers in the United States per Johns Hopkins University
There are at least 1,942,363 diagnosed cases in 50 states + the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and Guam. This is more than in any other country.
U.S. deaths: at least 110,514. New York State has the greatest number of reported deaths in the U.S., with 30,374.
U.S. total patients recovered: 506,367
U.S. total people tested: 20,235,678
The greatest number of reported COVID-19 cases in the U.S. is in New York, with 378,097 confirmed cases out of a total state population of 19.5 million. That is the most reported cases than in any other single region in the world. Moscow, Russia is next, with 197,018 reported cases out of a total population of at least 12.5 million.
Latest reported deaths per state
Visit https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html for the latest numbers.
School closures
For a state-by-state interactive map of current school closures, please visit the Education Week website, where numbers are updated once daily.
There are 98,277 public schools and 34,576 private schools in the U.S., according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Those schools educate almost 50.8 million public school students and 5.8 million private school students.
The latest headlines
COVID-19 deaths surpass 400,000 globally, 110,000 in US
Six months after the first COVID-19 case was reported in Wuhan, China, on December 31, 2019, the global death toll from the virus surpassed 400,000 people Sunday, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. The United States death toll passed 110,000 on Saturday, ten days after passing the 100,000 milestone. Globally, the number of reported confirmed COVID-19 cases exceeded 7,000,000 over the weekend, while the number of cases in the U.S. stands at over 1.9 million and is fast closing in on 2,000,000, a threshold that could well be crossed before the week is out.
Should we also be wearing eye protection against COVID-19 infection?
So far, guidance from medical experts has declared wearing a face mask, along with social distancing and frequent hand washing, is adequate to protect most of us from COVID-19 infection. But a new study by the British medical journal The Lancet suggests wearing eve coverings provides an additional layer of protection, potentially preventing respiratory droplets from entering through the eyes, as well as the nose and mouth. Although the study isn’t conclusive, it shows that wearing face shields, goggles and glasses – compared to no eye covering — were associated with a reduced risk of infection, lowering it from 16% down to 6%. Dr. Vincente Diaz, specialist in ocular immunology and infectious diseases and assistant professor of clinical ophthalmology at Yale University School of Medicine, tells ABC News that wearing glasses or eye coverings “seems prudent” in situations where the risk of exposure is greater than the norm, such as working in or visiting an area where there are lots of people, and especially if you have an underlying health condition that puts you at greater risk of infection. Glasses may serve as sufficient eye protection in average situations, with face shields providing more.
Data suggests COVID-19 may have hit China earlier than reported
The first reported case of COVID-19 infection came from Wuhan, China on December 31, 2019. However, a new Harvard Medical School study shows significant spikes in traffic around hospitals in Wuhan last fall, suggesting they may have been dealing with the virus much earlier than officially reported. Harvard medical professor Dr. John Brownstein, who led the research, tells ABC News that satellite imagery revealed a dramatic spike in traffic around five major Wuhan hospitals in October 2019, which also “coincided with” increased Chinese internet search queries for “certain symptoms that would later be determined as closely associated with the novel coronavirus.” Though the evidence is circumstantial, Brownstein says “Clearly, there was some level of social disruption taking place well before what was previously identified as the start of the novel coronavirus pandemic.”
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