The number of confirmed coronavirus cases has topped 20 million worldwide and a quarter of them are in the U.S., the latest tally revealed Tuesday.
Roughly a quarter of the nearly 740,000 deaths from COVID-19 were also in America, NBC News figures showed.
In just six weeks, the number of cases around the globe doubled as countries that had been in lockdown began opening up in April.
The same thing happened in the U.S., where the bulk of the new cases have been reported in the South and in the Sun Belt in states like Florida, which started reopening in May at the urging of President Donald Trump and have since seen an ongoing surge in new cases, including 276 more deaths reported Tuesday.
California, the state with the most cases thus far, now has 574,228 after an overnight increase of 12,750 cases. It also reported 117 more deaths, bringing that total up to 10,473.
And yet even as the world marked this melancholy milestone in the pandemic, Trump pushed for the resumption of college football and insisted the virus posed little danger to the athletes.
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“This attacks older people very viciously by the way,” Trump said Tuesday on FOX Sports Radio. “But these football players are very young, strong people physically. They’re not going to have a problem. Could it happen? I doubt it. You’re not going to see people dying. Young people have the sniffles.”
The Big 10, however, was not moved by Trump’s appeal. The league announced later Tuesday that it was postponing football and all other fall sports. That means players from storied football programs like Ohio State, Michigan, Penn State and Wisconsin won’t be on the gridiron this year.
“In making its decision, which was based on multiple factors, the Big Ten Conference relied on the medical advice and counsel of the Big Ten Task Force for Emerging Infectious Diseases and the Big Ten Sports Medicine Committee,'” the league said in a statement.
Earlier, the Mid-American Conference erred on the side of caution and became the first league to cancel its fall sports season because of coronavirus concerns.
Most of the COVID-19 fatalities in the U.S. have been the elderly and the infirm. And the American Health Care Association and National Center for Assisted Living released a report Tuesday showing that confirmed COVID-19 cases in U.S. nursing homes are rising rapidly again after a steady decline in June.
One of the latest victims was 100-year-old Annie Glenn, the widow of astronaut and U.S. Senator John Glenn, who spent her final years at a nursing home near St. Paul, Minnesota.
But health experts have also been warning for weeks that the age of the people catching the virus has been trending downward.
In fact, most of the blame for the case spikes in the U.S. has been aimed at quarantine-weary younger people who have been congregating at house parties and bars and refusing to wear masks or practice social distancing.
Also, a recent study by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association revealed a 40 percent increase in COVID-19 cases in children from July 16 to July 30.
Almost 100,000 children in the U.S. were sickened with the coronavirus in the last two weeks of July, the researchers found.
Corky Siemaszko
