Covid: The pandemic is accelerating in Delaware, the state newly thrust into the limelight as President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. builds his administration from his home in Wilmington. Daily reports of new Covid-19 cases in Delaware are up 50 percent from two weeks ago, according to a New York Times database.

The state saw relatively few cases through much of the year, but that has changed in the last month.

Delaware had 682 new cases on Tuesday, a record, said Jennifer Horney, the founding director of the epidemiology program at the University of Delaware. The state has averaged about 500 cases a day over the last week, more than triple the average in late October, according to the Times database.

“I think it is sort of like everywhere — people are fatigued and letting down their guard,” Dr. Horney said. “There is more community transmission among people of all ages.”

The number of Covid-19 patients in the state’s hospitals has doubled since the end of October, she said, and the state is bracing for even more patients once the lag time for infections over Thanksgiving has passed.

As of Wednesday morning, there had been at least 36,343 cases in Delaware and 777 deaths since the beginning of the pandemic, according to the Times database.

The state has been fairly consistent from the beginning of the pandemic in asking its residents to follow mitigation methods, including face masks and social distancing. Some of its regulations were tightened right before Thanksgiving, including capping gatherings in homes at 10 people, limiting indoor dining at restaurants to 30 percent of capacity and banning youth sports teams from leaving the state or playing opponents from out of state.

Given Delaware’s small size, residents often travel to the surrounding states — Maryland, Pennsylvania and New Jersey — all of which are seeing increasing cases. Still, the infection rates in the Mid-Atlantic states, relative to population, are still far below those in the upper Midwest.

In Delaware, previous outbreaks had been concentrated among the state’s large chicken farms and around the beach resorts in the southern part of the state. But these days, current cases are less linked to specific clusters and are spread more generally among people in the more populous north, Dr. Horney said.
— Neil MacFarquhar The New York Times