This State Has the Highest Number of COVID-19 Cases

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Feb 8, 9:09AM EST · Published Feb 7, 10:29AM EST

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This State Has the Highest Number of COVID-19 Cases — © miodrag ignjatovic / iStock via Getty Images

Vaccine distribution is well underway across the United States. Still, the novel coronavirus continues to spread through the population. In the last day alone, there were 96,207 new cases.

Since the first known case was identified in the U.S. on January 21, 2020, there have been a total of 27,150,916 reported cases of COVID-19 nationwide. Of course, infections are not evenly spread across the country, and some states have far higher infection rates per capita than others. The number of confirmed cases per 100,000 people ranges from as low as 1,836 to as high as 12,885, depending on the state.

Though the first case of the novel coronavirus in the United States was on the West Coast, the early epicenter of the outbreak was on the other side of the country, in New York City. In the months since, the parts of the country hit hardest by the virus shifted to the Southeast, the Midwest, and California.

Currently, the states with the lowest number of infections per capita tend to be concentrated in the Northeast, while the states with the highest population-adjusted infection rates are most likely to be located in the Midwest.

The severity of a COVID-19 outbreak across a given state is subject to a wide range of factors. Still, states that had a hands-off approach in the early days of the pandemic are more likely to be worse off today than those that adopted strict measures to control the spread. Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Wyoming were the only states that did not issue a statewide stay-at-home order in March or early April — and of those states, all seven currently have a higher infection rate than the U.S. as a whole.

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All COVID-19 data used in this story are current as of Feb. 3, 2021.

The state with the highest number of cases is North Dakota where cumulative cases of COVID-19 as of February 3 were 12,885 per 100,000 people based on a total of 97,936 cases. COVID-19 related deaths as of February 3 were 187 per 100,000 people based on 1,422 total deaths, Finally, the average new daily cases in the last week were 14.6 per 100,000 people based on a figure of 776 people. North Dakota’s population is 760,077, which ranks it 47th among all states.

Click here to see the states with the highest numbers of COVID-19 cases

Click here to see the state with the worst vaccination effort.

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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.