US marks second day with 70,000-plus new virus cases

For the second day running, the United States on Friday recorded more than 70,000 new coronavirus cases and more than 1,000 deaths in a 24-hour period, according to a tally maintained by Johns Hopkins University.

The world’s hardest-hit country registered 73,795 new cases of COVID-19 with 1,157 additional deaths, the Baltimore-based university’s real-time tracker indicated at 8:30 pm (0030 GMT Saturday).

That brings the country to a total of 4.1 million infections, which have resulted in 145,324 fatalities.

A total of 1.26 million people have recovered from the disease.

After a drop in the rate of infections in late spring, the US has seen a coronavirus surge, particularly in southern and western states like California, Texas, Alabama and Florida.

For the past 11 days, the number of new cases being reported each day has topped 60,000.

Scientists agree that an increase in death rates follows the spike in infections by three to four weeks.

After regularly surpassing 500 deaths a day around the end of June, the daily toll for the past three days has exceeded 1,000.