(NEW YORK) — Here are today’s In Crisis headlines:
860,000 Americans filed jobless claims last week
Some 860,000 Americans lost their jobs and filed for unemployment insurance last week, the Labor Department said Thursday. The latest tally shows that new jobless claims have dipped significantly since peaking at 6.9 million in the last week of March. Still, it shatters the pre-pandemic weekly record set in 1982 of 695,000. Meanwhile, more than 29.7 million people are still claiming unemployment benefits through all programs as of the week ending Aug. 29, the DOL said Thursday. In the same week last year, there were less than 1.5 million people claiming jobless benefits through all programs. For the week ending Aug. 29, the states with the highest insured unemployment rates were Hawaii (20.3%), California (17.3%) and Nevada (15.6%).
COVID-19 numbers
Here’s the latest data on COVID-19 coronavirus infections and deaths.
Latest reported numbers globally per Johns Hopkins University
Global diagnosed cases: 29,902,196
Global deaths: 941,381. The United States has the most deaths of any single country, with 196,831.
Number of countries/regions: at least 188
Total patients recovered globally: 20,339,873
Latest reported numbers in the United States per Johns Hopkins University
There are at least 6,631,751 reported cases in 50 states + the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and Guam. This is more than in any other country.
U.S. deaths: at least 196,831. New York State has the greatest number of reported deaths in the U.S., with 33,042.
U.S. total patients recovered: 2,525,573
U.S. total people tested: 90,710,730
The greatest number of reported COVID-19 cases in the U.S. is in California, with 772,188 confirmed cases out of a total state population of 39.51 million. That ranks third in the world after Maharashtra, India, which has 1,121,221 reported cases, and Sao Paulo, Brazil, which has 909,428 reported cases.
Public health officials say they need more money for COVID-19 vaccine distribution
Public health officials working to make a potential COVID-19 vaccine available to all Americans said they need more than $25 billion to make it happen, but the continued impasse between the Trump administration and congressional Democrats on another coronavirus relief package has stalled that much-needed funding. During a briefing in front of a Senate Appropriations Committee, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield said Wednesday that at this point the CDC does not have the resources to distribute a vaccine across the country, including infrastructure to accommodate transporting and storing doses at cold temperatures. He also testified that a vaccine will be “generally available to the American public” in the “late second quarter, third quarter 2021,” and said masks are more effective than a vaccine when it comes to COVID-19. At a White House news conference Wednesday evening, President Donald Trump disagreed with both assessments and said Redfield probably “made a mistake.”
2-month-old baby dies from COVID-19 in Michigan
A 2-month-old baby in Michigan has died from COVID-19. Michigan’s chief medical executive, Dr. Joneigh Khaldun, announced the infant’s death during a press conference Wednesday, while discussing how children are not spared from the novel coronavirus. Nearly 800 children across the United States have been diagnosed with Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C), a new pediatric disease associated with COVID-19 that can cause multiple organs to fail, according to Khaldun. Twenty children under the age of 1 have died of COVID-19 nationwide as of Sept. 12, according to the latest data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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