The election and the pandemic are colliding in the United States, with the country registering on Friday its highest daily number of cases since the pandemic began.
Johns Hopkins University reported 83,757 new cases.
This comes as President Donald Trump increases the frequency of his rallies in critical states, including Florida, where on Friday a large crowd of his supporters assembled at the retirement community, The Villages, out in the open but with several not wearing masks.
Mr Trump cast an early ballot yesterday, ahead of the Nov 3 vote, at a library serving as a polling centre in West Palm Beach, Florida. "I voted for a guy named Trump," he said with a smile as he emerged.
Separately, on Friday, Mr Trump's rival Joe Biden, who has been holding campaign events with smaller and more socially distanced audiences, made a speech on his strategy to control the pandemic if he were elected president.
Mr Biden's strategy includes a mandate to use face masks, at least on federal property and interstate transport throughout the country; ramping up testing and raising a national corps of contact tracers; and using the Defence Production Act to scale up production of personal protective equipment.
A Biden administration would "provide consistent, reliable, trusted, detailed nationwide guidance and technical support for reopening safely and the resources to make it happen", he said.
But opinion polls show that the pandemic is not a priority issue for Trump supporters, in particular, who care more concerning the economy.
Nationally, surveys indicate that the economy, the make-up of the Supreme Court bench and healthcare are top issues.
A Pew Research survey released last Wednesday showed that the gap between supporters of the rival camps over the importance of the pandemic has widened since August.
The survey was conducted from Oct 6 to 12. About 74 per cent of 8,972 registered voters polled said the economy was a very important issue to their vote. But there was a sharp decline in the share of Trump backers who rated the coronavirus as "very important", Pew said.
-
Mask wearing may save lives: US study
-
The number of potential Covid-19 deaths in the United States could drop by 130,000 if 95 per cent of Americans would cover their faces, the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) said.
The projection echoed a recommendation by top US infectious diseases expert Anthony Fauci, who suggested it might be time to mandate masks in the US as infection numbers continue to soar. "If people are not wearing masks, then maybe we should be mandating it," he told CNN on Friday.
"There's going to be a difficulty enforcing it, but if everyone agrees that this is something that's important and they mandate it and everybody pulls together... I think that would be a great idea to have everybody do it uniformly," the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said.
As winter approaches, health experts have raised concerns that the cooler weather will drive Americans indoors, where the coronavirus is more likely to spread.
That is why people need to "double down" on anti-virus measures that work, Dr Fauci said. "Universal mask wearing" is one, he said, as is keeping a distance from others and frequent hand-washing.
"They sound very simple. But we're not uniformly doing that and that's one of the reasons we're seeing these surges," he said.
US Health Secretary Alex Azar also attributed the increase in cases nationwide to the behaviour of individuals, saying household gatherings have become a "major vector of disease spread".
Asked about an assertion by US President Donald Trump during Thursday night's presidential debate that the US is "rounding the turn" on the pandemic, Mr Azar said Mr Trump was trying to give hope to Americans.
More than 84,000 people were diagnosed with Covid-19 across the US on Friday, another record one-day increase in infections.
The spike to 84,218 cases, breaking the record of 77,299 set on July 16, comes as IHME researchers forecast that the US death toll from Covid-19 could reach a total of 500,000 by February.
"We're heading into a very substantial fall/winter surge," said IHME director Chris Murray, who co-led the research.
Sixteen US states hit one-day records for new corona-virus infections on Friday, including five considered key in the Nov 3 presidential election: Ohio, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
REUTERS
"About eight in 10 Biden supporters (82 per cent) say the coronavirus will be very important to their vote, compared with just 24 per cent of Trump supporters," the report said.
"Since August, the share of Trump supporters who view the coronavirus as very important has declined 15 percentage points. There has been no change among Biden supporters."
A separate Gallup poll released on Oct 5 found that nearly nine in 10 registered voters consider the presidential candidates' positions on the economy very or extremely important to their vote.
At least three-quarters of voters consider six other issues to be important. In descending order of importance, they are: terrorism and national security, education, healthcare, crime, the reaction to the coronavirus, and race relations.
The proportion of voters saying the economy is extremely important rose from 30 per cent to 45 per cent between last December and the previous month, Gallup reported.
The survey also noted a large gap of 32 points between Democrats and Republicans on the importance of the pandemic, with Democrats far more concerned than Republicans.
Anecdotally, based on multiple interviews across three states, Trump supporters interviewed by The Sunday Times generally believe the President has done the best he could to manage the pandemic.
Asked concerning the spiking case numbers across the country, Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told MSNBC on Friday that the country was in a "precarious place".
He said the US needs to double down on fundamental public health measures like the universal wearing of masks, physical distancing and avoiding crowds, particularly indoors. "They seem rather simple… but they really do work," he said.
But with Mr Trump increasingly dismissive of him, the top expert now carries less weight.