US Passes Another Unwanted COVID Milestone

It's a milestone no one wanted to see: more than 50,000 COVID-19 deaths have been confirmed in the US, with more than 880,000 cases overall, the Wall Street Journal reports. And that death toll may actually be much higher, as the official CDC count only includes confirmed coronavirus cases, not suspected ones, the Washington Post notes. A month ago, there were about 700 dead in the US. Al Jazeera notes New York is still the state suffering the most, with upward of 263,000 cases overall and more than 16,000 deaths. The latest stats out of Johns Hopkins University, meanwhile, show that the worldwide total of virus cases is more than 2.7 million, with nearly 194,000 deaths.

That means the number of cases in the US account for nearly a third of all the cases in the world, the WSJ notes. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the latest development "staggering," saying at her weekly presser on Friday that "many people, as am I, are quite shaken" by it, per CNN. Meanwhile, some states already are starting to slowly reopen to mitigate the economic pain, a move that health experts warn could backfire. "We don't want to open things up, have a huge surge in cases, and have to lock everything down again," a rep from the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security tells the WSJ. "That would be even more detrimental to our society and our economy if we have to keep yo-yoing back and forth." (More coronavirus stories.)