INDEPENDENCE, Mo. — The seven-county Kansas City metro, Kansas, Missouri and the U.S. all posted new records for the most COVID-19 cases in any week since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic from Oct. 24-30, according to the 41 Action News Daily COVID-19 Tracker.
The Kansas City area and Missouri also reported new records for deaths in a single week.
The Kansas City area, which had reported more than 3,000 new cases only once (Oct. 3-9) since late July blew away its old record with 4,389 new cases — a 59.5% increase from last week.
The region — defined as Cass, Clay, Jackson and Platte counties in Missouri and Johnson, Leavenworth and Wyandotte counties in Kansas — also reported a record number of deaths for the third time in four weeks, climbing 28.1% from last week to a record 73 deaths for the week ending Friday.
Kansas saw the number of deaths last week more than cut in half from 116 to 54, which is the lowest for any week in October, but the number of new cases skyrocketed.
Kansas has set a single-week record five straight weeks now, but had never reported more than the 5,635 cases last week until reporting a whopping 8,744 this week, a 55.2% spike in just seven days.
The Johnson County Department of Health and Environment also reported a single-day record with 287 new cases overnight Friday.
Meanwhile, Missouri keeps setting records.
Two weeks after reporting a record 13,835 new cases, state and local health departments in Missouri reported 15,893 new cases in the last seven days — or more than 2,270 every day on average — with a record 274 deaths.
Missouri eclipsed 3,000 deaths earlier in the week, while Kansas topped 1,000 deaths — prompting Gov. Laura Kelly to order flags at half-staff — and the seven-county metro blew past 800 confirmed COVID-19 deaths.
Nationally, there were 561,199 new cases reported in the U.S., according to the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 tracker. The smashes the old record of 464,991 cases reported from July 18-24.
The number of deaths in the U.S. also climbed for the for third consecutive week, topping 1,000 on both Thursday and Friday – a pace not seen since mid-August. There were 5,790 deaths reported across the country during the last seven days.
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