U.S. reports more than half a million COVID-19 cases in 1 day

The U.S. reported more than half a million coronavirus cases on Thursday, officials say, breaking the previous day’s record by more than 100,000 and shattering all-time highs in 25 states.

Health departments across the U.S. reported 587,564 new cases on Thursday, an increase of 117% from last week, according to data from the BNO News/NewsNodes tracker. This marks the biggest one-day increase for any country in the world since the pandemic began.

The states reporting the highest numbers of new cases are: Florida (77,848), New York (74,207), California (49,598), New Jersey (35,175), Illinois (30,386), Georgia (24,420), Massachusetts (22,086), Ohio (19,774), Pennsylvania (19,436), and North Carolina (18,571).

Twenty-five states reported an all-time high in daily cases: FL, NY, NJ, IL, GA, MA, PA, NC, MD, TN, VA, LA, IN, CO, WI, AL, MO, CT, WA, RI, AR, HI, NH, DE, and VT. Records were also broken in D.C, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

The rolling 7-day average for daily cases is 347,459, up from 82,371 a month ago, and every single U.S. state is now marked as having high levels of COVID-19 transmission, according to the CDC, which estimates that 59% of daily cases are caused by the highly-contagious Omicron variant.

Meanwhile, the number of hospital patients with COVID-19 is continuing to surge after mostly small increases during the past few weeks. The tally reached 89,851 on Thursday, an increase of 27% since Sunday.

More than 1,400 deaths were reported on Thursday, taking the U.S. death toll to 826,115.