Maryland reports 1,053 newly confirmed coronavirus cases, 28 added to death toll

Maryland officials reported Sunday that the state has confirmed 1,053 new cases of the coronavirus.

Officials said Maryland totaled 32,587 cases of COVID-19. Twenty-eight more people died due to complications from the illness since Saturday, bringing the state total up to 1,538 fatalities.

In addition, 106 people have probably died due to the disease or complications of it, but are awaiting laboratory results to confirm their diagnosis.

As of Sunday, 1,640 people are currently hospitalized with the disease, a decrease of 25 patients, making it the third consecutive day with a decline.

Officials said 611 people are in intensive care and 1,029 people are in acute care.

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, has said he will start his three-stage plan to reopen businesses and lift social distancing restrictions after the state sees two weeks of declines in the number of new deaths and cases requiring hospitalization and intensive care.

“Hopefully over time we’ll learn to live with it, and we’ll be able to reduce the risk of transmission,” Inglesby said on Fox News Sunday, “but it’s going to stay as a background problem in the country and around the world until we have a vaccine.”

Inglesby also pressed the importance of more robust contact tracing and testing operations.

Over the weekend, Maryland Del. Kirill Reznik sent a letter to the health secretary questioning what has become of the 500,000 COVID-19 testing kits the state acquired from South Korea.

Hogan spokesman Mike Ricci wrote in an email that there are several indications the tests have been dispersed, including to nursing homes, though he did not provide a breakdown.

Ricci said that since Tuesday, the state has distributed roughly 4,000 tests to nursing homes. Many of those testing kits came from South Korea.

Hogan posted on Facebook that the state delivered on Saturday hundreds of COVID-19 tests to Charlotte Hall, a home for disabled veterans.

In total, 5,955 people in Maryland have been hospitalized due to complications from COVID-19, with 2,293 since released from isolation, the state reported.

Prince George’s and Montgomery counties continue to lead the state in total cases, with 9,496 and 6,762, respectively.

The two counties, Maryland’s two most populated, account for nearly half of all confirmed cases and deaths from the disease in the state.

The 20783 ZIP code — which includes parts of Hyattsville, Adelphi and Langley Park in Prince George’s County — continues to lead the state in total cases with 1,147, adding 43 new cases in the past 24 hours.

Silver Spring in Montgomery County continues to see a high concentration of cases as three ZIP codes associated with the D.C. suburb — 20906, 20902 and 20904 — have a combined 1,815 confirmed cases of the coronavirus. Those three ZIP codes alone have seen more than 400 newly confirmed cases of COVID-19 over the past week.

In Baltimore City, which has 3,317 total confirmed cases as of Sunday, the northwest part of the city continues to lead in terms of concentration of cases.

The 21215 ZIP code, which includes parts of Northwest Baltimore and Baltimore County, has 470 confirmed cases of the coronavirus.

Maryland’s black residents continue to be disproportionately affected by the pandemic. As of Sunday, 10,623 black residents were confirmed to have contracted the disease, the leading count among all racial demographics in the state despite making up less than a third of the state’s population.

Number of cases by county as of Sunday