US sees drop in COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, deaths

WASHINGTON - New COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths in the United States all dropped this week, according to The COVID Tracking Project.

New COVID-19 cases were down more than 16 percent over the previous week, and dropped below one million for the first time since the week of Nov 5.

"This is still an astonishing number of new cases per week, but far better than the nearly 1.8 million cases reported on the week of January 14," said the tracking project.

Hospitalizations have fallen rapidly for the past two weeks. The country has recorded 84,223 people hospitalized with COVID-19 as of Saturday, down about more than 40,000 from the country's peak in early January, but still three times as many as before the fall and winter case surge, according to the tracking project.

COVID-19 deaths also declined this week, the first weekly drop since mid-October that is not correlated with a holiday reporting period.

However, despite the decline, deaths remained arrestingly high -- more than 21,000 were reported over the past week.

More than 100,000 people in the United States have died of COVID-19 since Jan. 1 this year, according to Johns Hopkins University (JHU) data.

Currently, the seven-day averages for reported cases and deaths are about 120,000 and 3,200 per day, respectively, according to data of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

While the national level continues to drop, 10 states saw drops of more than 25 percent in new cases in the past week, according to the tracking project. In another 32 states, new cases declined by at least 10 percent, and only a single state -- Texas -- posted a double-digit increase in the same period.

The Super Bowl, one of the country's premier social occasions, falls on Sunday in California. Officials and experts are concerned that the game may pose a tremendous risk, and that widespread large watch parties could imperil California's precarious emergence from the worst wave of the pandemic.

The United States has more COVID-19 deaths than any other country in the world. The country has recorded over 26.98 million cases with around 463,000 related deaths as of Sunday afternoon, according to the real-time count kept by JHU.