The US is officially COVID-19′s epicenter
New York has been almost completely shut down to prevent the spread of COVID-19. (Pexels/)Follow all of PopSci’s COVID-19 coverage here, including travel advice, pregnancy concerns, and the latest findings on the virus itself. For global updates, see here.The United States now has more than 85,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by a novel coronavirus first detected in Wuhan, China in December and now spreading on every continent save for Antarctica. An increase of 15,000 known cases in just one day pushed the US past Italy and China, making it the new epicenter of the pandemic.“This could have been stopped by implementing testing and surveillance much earlier—for example, when the first imported cases were identified,” Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University in New York, told The New York Times.Experts suspect the actual number of US cases is much higher than currently reported: While President Donald Trump has...