The U.S. now has the most coronavirus cases in the world

TGIF, readers.

I’m sure many of you have had a stressful week, and I hope you’re staying well. Not to pile on to the craziness, but it’s important to stay informed. And the U.S. reached a grim milestone on Friday.

America now has the most number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the world, according to Johns Hopkins’ live tracker of the coronavirus spread across the globe. (If you haven’t been keeping up with this interactive map, it’s a vital, if depressing, resource at this time.)

Let’s break down some of the stats.

There are now more than 97,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases in the U.S. That’s over 10,000 more cases than Italy, one of the hardest-hit countries, has seen, and over 15,000 more cases than China, where the pandemic originally broke out.

Keep in mind that the bulk of the testing has been done in New York. There are nearly 26,000 cases in New York City alone; 7,200 in Westchester; 4,700 in Nassau; and thousands upon thousands more in California, Michigan, New Jersey.

It’s still unclear exactly how many people have been infected with coronavirus but it has now hit every single American state plus the District of Columbia. Known deaths have crossed 500 in New York and 1,200 across the country.

These numbers will continue to swell in the coming days, weeks, and months, according to public health officials, a reality which already has (and will continue to) put a massive burden on the nation’s health system and will test supply capacity for hospital beds, ventilators, and even basic equipment such as swabs needed to conduct many coronavirus tests.

Congressional leaders appear to have woken up to that reality in the past few weeks—the Senate’s record-breaking $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus bill a case in point.

But as the rapidly escalating numbers demonstrate, we are still very much in the midst of the storm.

Read on for the day’s news, and have a safe and healthy weekend.

Sy Mukherjee
sayak.mukherjee@fortune.com
@the_sy_guy

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