US Hits a Staggering New COVID Milestone

Congress is right now grappling with a surge in COVID cases, driven in part by what Bloomberg calls a "tsunami" of the fast-spreading omicron variant. Yet it's becoming increasingly clear the struggle that US lawmakers are facing is simply a microcosm of the larger picture within the US—a fact underscored by a new unsettling milestone. On Monday, 1.08 million new cases were reported across the nation, a record one-day rise for any nation, according to stats tracked by Johns Hopkins University. Forbes notes this figure is almost twice as much as the previous single-day record of 585,000, set just four days earlier on Dec. 30.

That Dec. 30 number, meanwhile, doubled upon the previous record set a week before that. Forbes notes the drastic rise is likely somewhat of a deviation, as reporting of cases may have been delayed over the holidays, but that doesn't take away from the fact that it's a number far beyond what any other country has seen at any point in the pandemic: Before this, India claimed the largest such daily case count, with more than 414,000 registered on May 7 of last year. Plus, the delay anomaly that Forbes references may be offset by the fact that, with many people now taking home antigen tests to see if they have COVID and not reporting results to government trackers, case numbers may be significantly underestimated. (More COVID-19 stories.)