Here’s how long it took the US to reach 6 million Covid-19 cases

The United States surpassed 6 million confirmed cases of coronavirus on Monday as the pandemic continued to spread widely across the country, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

JHU recorded the first case of Covid-19 in the US on January 21. Now, over seven months later, the US has totaled 6.03 million cases and over 183,000 deaths.

Here’s how the country got to more than 6 million cases:

• It took the country 99 days to reach 1 million cases on April 28.
• It then took 43 more days to reach 2 million cases on June 10.
• It took another 28 days to surpass 3 million cases on July 8.
• It took the US only 15 additional days to surpass 4 million cases on July 23.
• It took the US 17 days to go over 5 million cases on Aug. 9.
• It has taken the nation 22 days since then to reach 6 million cases on Aug. 31.

Of those 6 million cases, 2.76 million have been in the American South, more than double any other region. The West, the next highest region, has reported 1.28 million cases, and the Northeast and Midwest have each reported slightly under a million Covid-19 cases each.

Only two other countries in the world have over 1 million reported Covid-19 cases — Brazil and India.

Even now, the US is averaging over 40,000 new cases per day, and if that pace continues, the US would hit 7 million in about 25 days.

Still, despite a surge of new cases in the Midwest, overall cases have declined over the past few months.

“As a nation, we are clearly doing better now on the last day of August than we were on the first day of August,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute.

“(Daily) cases have come down. Deaths are starting to decline. Hospitalizations are down. This is good news, and it’s largely because of smart policies in Texas and Arizona and Florida around masking and closing bars,” Jha said.

“But there are still parts of the country where things are both bad and even getting worse. In the Dakotas, in Kansas and other states, we still see a lot of cases. And as a nation, we’re still seeing a lot of cases of coronavirus. So progress, but we have a long way to go.”