U.S. reports record 1.5M daily COVID cases, 145K hospitalizations

Yahoo Finance Video
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Yahoo Finance’s Anjalee Khemlani discusses the latest news on daily COVID-19 cases, which have hit new highs at 1.5 million cases for one day.

Video Transcript

EMILY MCCORMICK: The United States has reported a record number of COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations this week. And in response to the latest surge, the White House recently announced it plans to send 10 million COVID tests to schools every month to try and help keep in-person learning available. For more, we're joined now by Yahoo Finance's Anjalee Khemlani. Anjalee, break down these latest developments for us.

ANJALEE KHEMLANI: Well, Emily, like you mentioned, we're still watching this continued rise in cases. And we are seeing a couple of different things happening. So first, of course, those record numbers of cases. Just a reminder that we get that big bump over the weekend, of course, because some states don't necessarily report. So that more than 1.3 million, again, a record shattering number that started off the week, but still pushing up the daily average to beyond 750,000 cases per day.

Meanwhile, looking at the hospitalizations, we are still creating new records daily, a new record for the day at 147,000 hospitalizations. Meanwhile, we've seen deaths climb a little bit since last week, over 40%. We heard from CDC director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, saying that those deaths are actually-- could be contributed to the Delta variant, as we know that Omicron is slightly milder-- and I use milder with an asterisk, of course, next to it, knowing that it doesn't necessarily need the ventilators or really severe care.

So we're waiting to see how this all pans out, as has been the truth with all the other variants in the past. You've seen that delay from case to hospitalization to death. So we do still have to wait and see how this surge pans out in a couple of weeks. And to that point, we have seen the health experts, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, kind of try to pin the peak. And some have said that especially for the New York area and other hard-hit areas right now, we might be reaching the peak of the cases. So, again, wait and see, as always, with these surges, and we'll report when we know more. Back to you.