22 days from Election Day, pandemic shows no sign of slowing as U.S. edges closer to 8 million cases

"Overall the state is doing very well."Meanwhile, Idaho, South Dakota and Wisconsin have the three highest rates of new infections in the country, and Texas was close to eclipsing California as the state with the most confirmed cases.With the presidential election 22 days away and early voting underway in many states, the country had already logged over 7.8 million Covid-19 cases, and that number was expected to climb over 8 million by late Thursday, according to a projection by NBC News.That staggering sum seemed unimaginable back in February when President Donald Trump, whose much-criticized handling of the Covid-19 crisis has become a key campaign issue, insisted that the U.S. was in "very good shape" and that it was prepared to take on the pandemic.The U.S. continues to have the world's highest death toll, with nearly 216,000 fatalities as of Monday, according to the latest NBC News numbers.Six states — Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma and West Virginia — have all reported record single-day increases in numbers of new coronavirus cases.New York still has the most deaths, with 34,132, the figures show, but most of those were reported in the early days of the pandemic, when heath officials were still trying to come to grips with the new virus.Since then, however, New York has been able to flatten the curve, and it now has the nation's third lowest rate of new infections (after Maine and Massachusetts), with 1.18, according to the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Research Center.Still, clusters of infections have popped up in Brooklyn and Rockland County, which are home to large groups of Orthodox Jews.