Daily Virus Death Toll Rises in Some States

The daily number of deaths from the coronavirus has risen recently in some of the nation’s most populous states, leaving behind grieving families and signaling a possible end to months of declining death totals nationally.

In Texas, officials announced 119 deaths on Wednesday, surpassing a daily record for deaths in the pandemic that the state had set only a day earlier. In Arizona, more than 200 deaths have been announced already this week, and the daily virus death toll in the state reached higher than ever. Mississippi, Florida and Tennessee also set single-day death records this week....

The seven-day death average in the United States reached 608 on Thursday, up from 471 earlier in July, but still a fraction of the more than 2,200 deaths the country averaged each day in mid-April, when the situation in the Northeast was at its worst.

Some health experts cautioned that it was too early to predict a continuing trend from only a few days of data. But on Friday, Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, struck a different tone than President Trump has in recent days, saying that she expects to soon see an increase in deaths.

“In the United States, we have increased number of cases over the last particularly three weeks,” Dr. Birx said during a virtual panel on the virus organized by the International AIDS Society. “We have not seen this result in increased mortality, but that is expected as the disease continues to spread in some of our large metro areas where comorbidities exist.”

The rising pace of deaths in the Sunbelt followed weeks of mounting cases in the region and suggested an end to the country’s nearly three-month period of declines in daily counts of virus deaths — a pattern that had been seen as one of the rare bright spots in the nation’s virus outlook.