The increase in deaths comes as governors across the country seek scarce ventilators and as police officers issue citations to residents who ignore orders to stay home. With infection rates expected to continue rising, Americans have been urged to wear face coverings in public, convention centers have been converted into makeshift medical centers and some states have released prisoners in an effort to limit the spread.
As of Tuesday afternoon, at least 395,090 people across every state, plus Washington, D.C., and four U.S. territories, have tested positive for the virus, according to a New York Times database.
The outbreak in this country, which now has the highest number of known cases in the world, looks vastly different than it did a month or even a week ago. At the start of March, with extremely limited testing available, only 70 cases had been reported in the United States, most of them tied to overseas travel. And since the start of April, the number of deaths has grown by thousands, driven in part by doublings in death totals in Indiana, Florida and other states.
As the number of known cases reached into the hundreds, then the thousands, then the hundreds of thousands, life all over the country has changed in profound ways. Malls, salons and dine-in restaurants have been forced to close. The Kentucky Derby, the Indy 500 and baseball’s Opening Day were postponed. Some states have told people arriving from elsewhere to quarantine themselves. Others have warned that the pause on public life will likely last weeks more, and that the worst of the pandemic is still to come.
The New York Times is engaged in a comprehensive effort to track the details of every confirmed case in the United States, collecting information from federal, state and local officials around the clock. The numbers in this article are being updated several times a day based on the latest information our journalists are gathering from around the country. The Times has made that data public in hopes of helping researchers and policymakers as they seek to slow the pandemic and prevent future ones.
No state has been hit harder than New York, which accounts for about half the country’s coronavirus-related deaths and where new cases continue to be reported each day by the thousands. With hospitals stretched thin and medical equipment in short supply, the state has turned to Oregon and China for emergency shipments of ventilators.
“It feels like an entire lifetime,” Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said on Saturday, when he predicted that the peak of the virus was still days away in his state. “I think we all feel the same, these stresses, this country, this state — like nothing I’ve experienced in my lifetime.”
People with the virus have died in more than 20 New York counties, including more than 230 victims each in Nassau, Suffolk and Westchester Counties. But New York City has faced the worst, with thousands of known cases in each borough. The city’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, compared the pandemic to “many Katrinas.” A Manhattan convention center was preparing for patients. A Navy hospital ship was docked in the city. A field hospital had been set up in Central Park, and another was planned for a cathedral.
“This is going to be a reality where you are going to have many cities and states simultaneously in crisis, needing health care professionals, needing ventilators,” Mr. de Blasio said on MSNBC’s “AM Joy.”
Though New York has had by far the most cases, other Northeastern states have also seen their case totals increase rapidly. New Jersey now has the second-highest number of known cases in the country. In Massachusetts, more than 2,000 new cases were announced over the weekend. In Connecticut, more than 200 people have died.
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