The Country With the Most COVID-19 Cases in History

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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The Country With the Most COVID-19 Cases in History

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It has been more than three years since the first COVID-19 case was discovered in America. According to government records, that first case was diagnosed on January 20, 2020. Three years later, the United States has had about 102 million cases. Almost every scientist in the country believes that figure is much too low. However, the figure makes the United States the nation with the most infections in history. (Click here for the nine biggest threats the world faces in 2023.)
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COVID-19 infections in America came in four waves. The first was early, in March through May 2020. The next was in early January 2021, followed by another in October of the same year. The most recent was in early 2022. Vaccines and the huge number of infected people are credited for the lack of another big surge.
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The count could be off because many Americans could have been diagnosed with other diseases. Many cases have been asymptomatic. Testing in most of America has all but disappeared. Even people who get ill may not report it.
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The fact that America is at the top of the list of COVID-19 infections may not be true. India, the second most populated nation in the world, has only reported 44.6 million cases. China, the world’s largest country by population, says it has only 95.8 million. These counts are incorrect because governments want to look effective in handling the disease. Moreover, because each country has vast rural areas, millions of cases were not diagnosed officially.
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America’s huge figure has been blamed on several things. One is that millions of Americans refused vaccination. Another is that governments in some parts of the country did little to shut down areas where the virus was spreading quickly. COVID-19 denial by individuals in America may be the highest in the world.

Despite the inaccurate figures, the United States sits at the top of the COVID-19 infection list.

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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