3 Million Cases: Coronavirus Continues To Surge Across U.S.

A passerby wears a mask out of concern for the coronavirus while walking past an American flag displayed in Boston on Tuesday. The U.S. has now recorded more than 3 million confirmed cases of the coronavirus.

Steven Senne / AP

The U.S. has reported more than 3 million coronavirus cases as of Wednesday morning, with all but a handful of states struggling to control outbreaks of COVID-19. One million of those cases have been confirmed over the past month — part of a wave of infection that began after many states started to reopen their economies in May.

The total number of cases also includes nearly 1 million people declared to have recovered. But more than 130,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 – roughly twice the death toll of any other country, according to a tracker from Johns Hopkins University. Most experts believe those numbers vastly underestimate the disease’s true toll.

“I did not expect it to grow this quickly” in the U.S., says Bob Bednarczyk, assistant professor of global health and epidemiology at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University in Atlanta.