In Georgia, 200 national guard troops are helping staff testing sites and hospitals and in Arizona and New Mexico, federal medical personnel have deployed to bolster the local health services. Record case counts are being logged in states and cities across the US, including New Jersey, New York and Chicago. New cases per day have more than doubled over the past two weeks, eclipsing the old mark of 250,000, set in mid-January during the height of the last winter peak of the pandemic, according to data kept by Johns Hopkins University. “It’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen, even at the peak of the prior surges of Covid,” Dr James Phillips, chief of disaster medicine at George Washington University Hospital, told CNN. The seven-day rolling average of cases in America is also soaring to a new high of more than 265,000 per day on average, a surge driven largely by the highly contagious Omicron variant.
