Mississippi and Montana set single-day records in cornoavirus-related deaths as these states reported 67 and 6 new casualties, respectively, on Tuesday.
Mississippi's COVID death toll rose to 2,315 and total cases climbed to 79,206, while Montana has recorded 97 deaths and 6,624 cases.
U.S. islands in the Caribbean and the Pacific, which stayed unaffected as the pandemic was sweeping over parts of the mainland, have emerged as the latest COVID-19 hot spots.
Puerto Rico is the worst-affected among them with 30,744 cases and 404 deaths, as per John Hopkins University's latest update on Wednesday.
Hawaii, which allows restaurants and gyms to remain open, has 6,984 cases and 49 casualties.
The U.S. Virgin Islands have so far reported 14 deaths and 1,030 cases, while 9 people died and 1,120 others have been infected in Guam.
After a brief lull, COVID-19 deaths in the United States returned to the 1,000-plus level.
With 1,246 additional deaths reported in the last 24 hours, the total number of COVID-19 casualties in the country rose to 178,525.
This is nearly three times more than what was recorded in the previous two days.
With 38,462 more people getting infected by the virus in the last 24 hours, the total cases in the U.S. reached 5,779,371.
Experts attribute the recent fall in number of new cases to both an increase in mask-wearing and a drop in the number of tests being carried out.
A biotech conference held in February is the suspected source of about 20,000 COVID-19 cases in the Boston area, according to a new study that was posted to the online server medrxiv.org.
"Many factors made the conference an unfortunate perfect storm as a super spreading event. That the virus was introduced at the conference at all was unlucky," CNN quoted Bronwyn MacInnis, a researcher at the Broad Institute who worked on the study, as saying.
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