Five states caused almost half of all US Covid cases in last week

Five states in the US have accounted for almost half of the country’s new coronavirus infections in the past week, data has shown.

According to data from the Johns Hopkins University, New York, Michigan, Florida, Pennsylvania and New Jersey together reported 44 per cent of the nation’s new Covid-19 infections.

Out of the 452,000 total US infections in the latest available seven-day period, the five states recorded 197,500 of those new cases.

Together, the states account for just 22 per cent of the US population, with Michigan in particular having seen the highest rate of new infections in the past two weeks.

In the state, the seven-day average of daily new infections reached 6,719 cases on Sunday, a number that sits at more than double what it was two weeks earlier.

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Despite the hike in cases, Democratic Gov Gretchen Whitmer is reluctant to tighten restrictions, blaming the surge on pandemic fatigue and more contagious variants.

Other elected officials and health experts have said that other more contagious variants of the virus like B117 have contributed to increases both in Michigan and other parts of the country.

According to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Florida and Michigan have recorded the two highest totals of the variant, at 3192 and 1649 respectively.

Pennsylvania has so far recorded 655 cases of the variant, which was first detected in the UK, with New Jersey reaching 627 cases while New York hits 136, the CDC said.

The variant, named  B117, is believed to be twice as transmissible as the dominant strain in the US, meaning its spread could lead to increased hospitalisations and put pressure on health services.

Nationwide the CDC says more than 16,200 cases of the B117 variant have been confirmed in surveillance testing in the US, with the variant having been recorded in all 50 states.

The agency stipulated that their data on the variants is based on a sampling of positive tests and do not represent the total number of cases of variants that may be circulating in the country.

On Wednesday, the director of the Centers for Disease Control, Dr Rochelle Walensky, said that the B117 variant had become the most common "lineage" of the novel virus in the United States.

"Based on our most recent estimates from CDC surveillance, the B117 is now the most common lineage circulating throughout the United States," she said.

The heavy concentration of new cases has prompted some experts and elected officials to call for President Joe Biden’s administration to ship additional vaccine doses to the worst hit states.

Dr Elvin H Geng, a professor in infectious diseases at Washington University told the Associated Press that “it only makes sense to send vaccines to where the cases are rising.”

However, he warned that upping doses for other states could mean areas recording less cases could see less vaccine as a result.

“You wouldn’t want to make those folks wait because they were doing better,” he said.

So far, the White House has shown no signs of shifting from its policy of dividing vaccine doses among states based on population.

In total, the US has recorded over 30.9 million cases of the novel coronavirus since the pandemic began, leading to the deaths of over 556,000 people.

The country has administered over 169 million vaccinations, equating to 32.6 per cent of the population, with around 108 million of those shots being the first dose.

Additional reporting by the Associated Press