US COVID-19 Cases Surpass 9.5 Mln -Johns Hopkins University

The total number of COVID-19 cases in the United States surpassed 9.5 million on Thursday, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University.

U.S. COVID-19 case count rose to 9,516,790, with the national death toll reaching 234,011, as of 12:25 p.m. local time (1625 GMT), according to the CSSE.

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Texas recently surpassed California to become the U.S. state with the most cases, standing at 960,583. California reported 951,989 cases, and Florida registered 821,123 cases, followed by New York with 515,815 cases.

Other states with over 210,000 cases include Illinois, Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Arizona, New Jersey, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan, according to the CSSE.

By far, the United States remains the nation worst hit by the pandemic, with the world's most cases and deaths, making up nearly 20 percent of the global caseload and death toll, respectively.

The United States reported 102,831 new cases on Wednesday, the first time ever the country has recorded more than 100,000 daily cases since the pandemic began, according to the data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

As the virus has continued to rage across the country, some U.S. states and cities have started to enact new rules, including having mask mandates, imposing curfews, limiting capacity at stores, restaurants, and houses of worship.

Facing the skyrocketing cases in the United States, Robert Redfield, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), urged in his tweet that now is the time to develop a testing strategy to identify the silent epidemic of asymptomatic COVID-19 infections.

CDC said on its website that asymptomatic cases are "challenging to identify" because individuals do not know they are infected unless they are tested.

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington predicted a total of 399,163 COVID-19 deaths in the United States by Feb. 1, 2021, based on current projection scenario.