Coronavirus updates: State reports over 49,000 new cases, 468 new deaths

More than 373,000 Americans have died from COVID-19.

Last Updated: January 11, 2021, 7:47 AM EST

A pandemic of the novel coronavirus has now infected more than 90 million people worldwide and killed over 1.9 million of them, according to real-time data compiled by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.

Latest headlines:

Here's how the news developed this week. All times Eastern.
Jan 05, 2021, 11:32 AM EST

Browns' head coach tests positive for COVID-19

The head coach for the Cleveland Browns, Kevin Stefanski, has tested positive for COVID-19, the Browns announced in a Twitter statement Tuesday.

The football team's contingency plan is to have special teams coordinator Mike Priefer serve as acting head coach. The news comes just before the Browns' first NFL playoff game in 18 years on Sunday.

In addition to Stefanski, two coaching staff members and two players tested positive. The team's facility is currently closed for contact tracing purposes.

-ABC News' Michael Kreisel contributed to this report.

Jan 05, 2021, 10:25 AM EST

Los Angeles County ambulances told not to transport patients with low chance of survival

As hospitals across Los Angeles County reach capacity, ambulance crews have been told not to transport patients with little chance of survival.

The Los Angeles County Emergency Medical Services Agency issued the order Monday with immediate effect, saying "adult patients in blunt traumatic and nontraumatic out-of-hospital cardiac arrest" shall not be brought to the hospital if they cannot be resuscitated in the field due to the "severe impact" of the coronavirus pandemic on the health care system. That includes victims of heart attacks, gunshot wounds, stabbings and car crashes.

After administering him with oxygen, Los Angeles County paramedics load a potential COVID-19 patient into an ambulance before transporting him to a hospital in Hawthorne, California, on Dec. 29, 2020.
Apu Gomes/AFP via Getty Images

Los Angeles County has the highest tally of confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths of any county in the United States, according to a real-time count kept by Johns Hopkins University.

Data posted by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health shows there were 7,697 people who remained hospitalized with COVID-19 on Monday.

Jan 05, 2021, 8:12 AM EST

Arizona has world's highest rate of COVID-19, data shows

Arizona currently has the highest rate of COVID-19 infections per capita of anywhere in the world, according to a graph created by 91-DIVOC, which used data collected by Johns Hopkins University.

91-DIVOC is an online data visualization project created by Wade Fagen-Ulmschneider, a teaching associate professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The graph, which is updated daily with data collected by Johns Hopkins University, shows that the southwestern U.S. state has an average of 112.1 newly confirmed cases per 100,000 people a day over the past week.

Vehicles line up as people wait for COVID-19 tests at a drive-thru testing center in Phoenix, Arizona, on Dec. 8, 2020.
Ross D. Franklin/AP

Meanwhile, the Czech Republic has the highest infection rate of any country, with a seven-day average of 96.7 new cases per 100,000 people a day. The United States as a whole has a seven-day average of 65.4, the sixth highest of any country, the graph shows.

Arizona's Department of Health Services has reported more than 561,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic, including over 9,000 deaths. The state has seen a surge in new cases over the past week, which would account for the per capita ranking, according to ABC Phoenix affiliate KNXV.

Jan 05, 2021, 6:52 AM EST

Retired CT state trooper who was among 1st to respond to Sandy Hook shooting dies of COVID-19

A retired Connecticut State Police trooper, who was among the first to respond to the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, has died of COVID-19, officials said.

Patrick Dragon, 50, of Brooklyn, Connecticut, died Saturday at Hartford Hospital in the state's capital, according to the Connecticut State Police, which announced his death in a Facebook post Monday night.

The Foster Police Department in the Rhode Island town of Foster, where Dragon was working as a dispatcher, confirmed his death "after a valiant battle with COVID."

Foster Police Chief David Breit described Dragon as "a great person, kind, caring and a friend to all who met him."

"There are not enough words, to describe the kind of a person that Patrick was," Breit wrote in a Facebook post Sunday morning.

The East Brooklyn Fire Department in the Connecticut town of Brooklyn, where Dragon served for 34 years, most recently as a deputy chief, also announced his death.

"We cannot express how deeply he will be missed and wish to extend our deepest condolences to the Dragon family," the department wrote in a Facebook post.

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