Our daily update is published. New cases and tests were near the record highs set yesterday.

But the biggest milestone today is that the 7-day average for COVID-19 deaths reported by states fell below 500.

That said, the dynamics of COVID-19 deaths in this second surge remain complicated.

Deaths are not falling everywhere. In Arizona, for example, daily average deaths have tripled since June.

In Texas, too, daily average deaths have risen ~50% in the last two weeks.

Read more on the complexities of lag times, changing demographics, and COVID-19 deaths here: https://covidtracking.com/blog/why-changing-covid-19-demographics-in-the-us-make-death-trends-harder-to

Looking at new cases, the trends of the last couple weeks continue. Florida became the second state to record a day of over 10,000 new cases (after New York on April 15th). Georgia set a new record yesterday and broke it today.

It should be obvious now, but the large numbers of new cases in these states are not just due to testing. Florida and Georgia have positivity rates well beyond 10%.

Only Arizona has a higher positivity rate than Florida right now.

In May, we did not break 30k cases in a day. Today, the South alone reported 32,830.

Finally, we are making our chartmaking tools available on the website, so you can do more data exploration during this crucial time in the pandemic.

A huge thank you to @PeterJ_Walker, who built these excellent views, and to @tableau for their support.
https://covidtracking.com/data/charts 

Sadly, we had some historical data adjustments come in right after we pulled the numbers for these tweets. They nudged deaths up, pushing the 7-day average back over 500. Here's what the data like now: https://covidtracking.com/data/charts/us-daily-deaths