Jeenah Moon/Getty Images(NEW YORK) — After promising data showed a plateau in New York’s COVID-19 activity, on Tuesday the state saw its largest single-day death toll jump in a span of 24-hours.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo says 731 people died between Monday and Tuesday, bumping the state’s death toll to 5,489 as of Tuesday evening.
The state has reported 140,386 confirmed COVID-19 cases as of Wednesday morning.
Even so, the state has seen a plateau in the hospitalization rate over the past three days, and Cuomo encouraged the public to continue practicing social distancing guidelines. “It still depends on what we do. This is not an act of God … it’s an act of what society actually does,” he cautioned Tuesday.
Cuomo also touched upon the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, which killed 30,000 New Yorkers. “They didn’t react the way we did and they didn’t know what we know today,” he said.
In the neighboring state, New Jersey, Governor Phil Murphy has closed county parks as the state grapples with a rise in cases, which now stands at 44,416.
Louisiana, another state that has been hit hard by the pandemic, says its death toll had reached at least 582 on Tuesday, while its confirmed cases has reached 16,284, the sixth-highest number in the nation. Despite that, Governor John Bel Edwards says the curve might be flattening in the state as people on ventilators shrank from 552 to 519 over the span of 24 hours.
The city of Detroit has reported 5,501 cases of COVID-19 and a death toll of 221. Mayor Mike Duggan announced the launch of 15-minute testing sites for the city’s Department of Transportation employees. In addition, he announced the rate of infections has been slowing “every five or six days.”
As of Wednesday morning, there are over 399,929 COVID-19 cases in the U.S. as the death toll creeps closer to 13,000.
Worldwide, well over 1.4 million people have been infected by the virus and at least 83,149 people have died as of Tuesday.
Italy remains the country with the highest death toll, at over 17,100.
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