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US Records All-Time High With More Than 100,000 New COVID-19 Cases In One Day

Updated September 1, 2021

While nations like New Zealand, Vietnam, and Taiwan appear to have their COVID-19 situations under control, many others where case numbers had once diminished have seen a resurgence.

Nations like Britain, France, and Germany have re-introduced national lockdown measures to try to rein in their case numbers, and Italy is bringing lockdowns back to several regions as well.

In America, however, with few new measures to prevent the disease's spread, cases are predictably soaring just about everywhere, putting the nation in a class of its own, and not in a good way.

The U.S. passed a sobering milestone Wednesday, marking the first time the nation recorded more than 100,000 new COVID-19 infections in a single day.

It's a situation experts saw coming. In fact, NIH director and infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci did predict the nation hitting 100,000+ new cases per day when he testified before a Senate committee in June, as ABC News reported.

"We are now having 40-plus thousand new cases a day. I would not be surprised if we go up to 100K a day if this does not turn around so I’m very concerned," Dr. Fauci told the committee at the time. "I think it’s important to tell you and the American public that I’m very concerned because it could get very bad."

The rise in cases can't be attributed merely to testing.

As CNN reported, over the past week, new cases rose 21%, while testing only increased by 4.52%.

Behind the large case numbers, of course, are thousands and thousands of hospitalizations. According to the Covid Tracking Project, 16 states set records for the number of COVID-19 cases requiring hospitalization on Wednesday: Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

Those hospitalizations are threatening to overwhelm some state healthcare systems.

Kentucky, for example, is facing a crisis. The health commissioner for the state, Dr. Steven Stack, told CNN that his concern is "not that we will first run out of bed space but that we may not have enough health care workers to staff all those beds."

Meanwhile, in El Paso, Texas, a fourth mobile morgue has been brought in and all non-essential services have been shut down by the order of a county judge, an order the state's attorney general is trying to overturn.

"Our hospitals are near the breaking point," El Paso health authority Dr. Hector Ocaranza told KVIA.

h/t: CNN, ABC News

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