GA COVID Cases Top 60K, Now Equal To Population Of Marietta

ATLANTA, GA — Georgia passed 60,000 cases of coronavirus in statistics released Wednesday by the state’s health department.

The reported case number of 60,030 is roughly equal to the population of Marietta. It’s greater than the populations of Valdosta, Smyrna or Brookhaven. And it’s rapidly approaching the population of Albany, where Georgia’s first COVID-19 hotspot broke out.

The Georgia Department of Public Health also reported 46 more deaths since Tuesday, raising the total to 2,575 deaths in Georgia from COVID-19, the illness caused by the novel coronavirus.

As of 2:50 p.m. Wednesday, more than 9,500 Georgians have been hospitalized, with just more than 2,000 of them in the intensive care unit. No information is available from Georgia about how many patients have recovered.

Georgia has tested 763,149 people so far, including both viral and antibody testing. So far, 61,198— or about 8 percent — have tested positive.

Counties in or near metro Atlanta continue to have the highest number of cases, with Gwinnett County now in first place with 5,658 confirmed positives. Fulton County is second with 5,292, DeKalb is third with 4,489, Cobb is fourth with 3,712 and Hall is fifth with 2,822. Wednesday’s statistics also identify 1,154 cases of COVID-19 as from "unknown" counties, with 2,813 cases counted as "Non-Georgia."

Fulton County reports the most deaths, with 299, followed by Cobb County with 222. Gwinnett County is third with 158, DeKalb is fourth 155, and Dougherty County — site of the state’s first major outbreak and where Albany is the county seat — has 151 deaths.

Globally, nearly 8.3 million cases of coronavirus have been confirmed, with 445,762 deaths, according to numbers tallied Wednesday afternoon by Johns Hopkins. In the U.S., nearly 2.2 million people have been confirmed to have COVID-19, with 117,423 deaths confirmed as of Wednesday.

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