As Part of U.S. COVID-19 Reopening Steps, Midwest Governors Form Coalition
what the data shows,” Cuomo said during his daily briefing from Albany. “I don’t want to project beyond that period.”
As of yesterday, New York has 222,284 cases and 12,192 deaths. The New York death rate continues to spike as state authorities have now begun to include presumed COVID-19 fatalities in the daily totals.
According to a ProPublica investigation, New York City is recording an average of 200 in-home deaths per day, and Detroit and Boston have also recorded spikes in deaths at home, which may represent undercounted COVID-19 fatalities.
According to the John Hopkins University COVID-19 tracker, the United States has 629,264 cases, including 26,708 deaths.
South Dakota Has Biggest COVID-19 Cluster in U.S.
CIDRAP reports that the Smithfield pork processing plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, is now home to the largest cluster of COVID-19 cases in the country, with 644 people with connections to the plant testing positive as of yesterday. That’s more than half of the state’s COVID-19 total, which is 1,168. So far, at least one Smithfield plant employee has died from the disease.
South Dakota remains one of eight states without statewide shelter-in-place orders. Yesterday Politico reported that many of those states, in the nation’s farm belt, are seeing spikes of COVID-19 activity, including Nebraska, Iowa, and South Dakota.
In the past week , Nebraska has seen a 30 percent increase in cases, as has North Dakota. Cases increased by 260 percent in South Dakota and 26 percent in Oklahoma. According to Politico, these rates compare to roughly 26 percent over the same period in New York, the epicenter of the pandemic.
Report: Underfunding Contributed to Crisis
Trust for America’s Health (TFAH) released a new report yesterday suggesting that years of chronic underfunding of America’s public health systems, including repeated budget cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), primed the country for a pandemic such as COVID-19.
According to a press release on the report, TFAH found that funding for state and local public health emergency preparedness and response programs has been reduced by approximately one third since 2003.
“Of critical concern now, funding for the Hospital Preparedness Program, the only federal source of funding to help the healthcare delivery system prepare for and respond to emergencies, has been cut by half since 2003,” TFAH said.
The report also said that, from 2016 to 2018, state expenditures of federal monies for public health activities decreased from $16.3 billion to $12.8 billion. TFAH calls on lawmakers to increase funding to the CDC by 22 percent by Fiscal Year 2022.
