Brilliant. Well done us.

More than 68,000 new cases of Covid-19 were recorded in the US on Friday, the highest number in a single day since July, further confirmation the country is in the midst of a coronavirus resurgence.

That’s the worst it’s been since the end of July. Wrong direction, folks.

Cases dipped from August to mid-September. But public health experts have long feared a rise in cases as the weather starts to cool, leading people indoors, where the virus is more likely to spread. Cases are increasing in a majority of states, particularly in the northern midwest, including the Dakotas, Montana and Wisconsin – where Donald Trump was due to stage a rally on Saturday night.

This week, the US has averaged 55,000 new cases a day, a 60% increase compared with mid-September.

“You can’t enter into the cool months of the fall and the cold months of the winter with a high community infection baseline,” said Dr Anthony Fauci, the top US infectious disease expert, on Friday, while discussing the difficulties the virus will present in the coming weeks.

You can’t but we are.

Fauci says we’re still in the first phase, because the count has never gone down enough to say that phase is over.

New cases reached 4,100 in Wisconsin on Friday, a record daily high. The state has set up overflow hospital facilities and the national guard is manning extra testing sites.

Joe Biden currently leads Donald Trump by about seven points in Wisconsin, generally considered a battleground state. On Saturday Trump was due to stage a rally in Janesville, about 175 miles away from La Crosse, Minnesota, his intended venue until local officials urged the president to move the rally amid a surge of cases.

That’s confusing. They mean he was going to do the rally in LaCrosse but now he’s doing it in Janesville.

While incidents of coronavirus transmission in open-air environments have not been documented as thoroughly as viral spreading in indoor settings, Wisconsin’s governor, Tony Evers, a Democrat, suggested it was reckless for the president to draw thousands of people together in a “red zone” for transmission.

“The president could do two things: one is maybe not come to these two municipalities and cities that are ranked right up towards the top of all the places in the country [for infections],” Evers said.

“The second thing that could be done is for him to insist that if people are there, they wear a mask. He can make that happen. He could wear one too. Those are the two things that he could do to make sure that it doesn’t become a super-spreader event.”

He could do that but he won’t.